After a couple bouts with cancer and everything, black cats are nothin', you know?
So often when Black men have to play roles on TV, we're either the noble savage or we're completely a savage, and there's no nuance.
I've said numerous times the hardest job in America isn't being a professional athlete. It's not being a matador or having some job that puts your life at risk. The hardest job in America is being black, because it's the one thing you can't outrun.
Have I ever left the field with a broken nose, black eye? Yes, numerous times. I've had a broken nose and a few black eyes. It's part and parcel of the game, really.
I was the black atheist kid in the all-white Catholic school run by nuns.
My father was a black, working-class man who arrived here with no money in his pocket from Nigeria; my mum came from more of a middle-class background, whose father had prosecuted the Nazis at Nuremberg.
Like brown rice, black rice is unmilled, and it is the dark outer husk that makes it so nutty and chewy. It's also why it takes longer to cook than many other rices.
I think I just went into a system that was willing to utilize me and gave me opportunities and I felt fortunate to be able to go to Oakland and put the silver and black on. I wanted to prove to everybody that I could still play.
Any time you stop looking at evil as a black and white thing, it's helpful. So the fact that there won't be any obligatory Islamic terrorist stereotypes in movies any more, that'd be helpful.
I think black women feel an obligatory pressure to be stronger than everybody else, not necessarily to suppress the pain.
Americans have their issues with skin colour, even within the black community, with light and dark skin; it's crazy - but no one's oblivious to it.
Wherever you go in the history of America, there have been Black people making contributions, but their contributions have been obscured, lost, buried.
The early universe was a dusty place, and the UV radiation from the hot, young black holes and stars would get enshrouded by dust, re-radiated, and scattered into red wavelengths like infra-red, causing these objects to remain obscured.
The fact that women are very young in obtaining their civil rights and African-Americans are young in obtaining their civil rights, I think it's about time that we extend that to all Americans, whether straight, gay, purple, green, black, brown.
I know how young black men are seen. They're boys - scared little boys, oftentimes. I was one of them. I was completely afraid of the Los Angeles Police Department.
Scripts were rather scarce in 1968. We did a lot of Amiri Baraka's plays, the agitprop stuff he was writing. It was at a time when black student organizations were active on the campuses, so we were invited to the colleges around Pittsburgh and Ohio, and even as far away as Jackson, Mississippi.
And the whole thing is that you're treated like a step-child. Here it was down here, everything in the black, because they were stealing, basically. Stealing from us old country boys down here.
It's the same old story. Nothing in this world happens unless white folks says it happens. And therein lies the problem of being a professional black storyteller - writer, musician, filmmaker.
There was such hostility to the idea of a banjo being a black instrument. It was co-opted by this white supremacist notion that old-time music was the inheritance of white America.
Cubans can be as conversant as any Netflix-and-chill American about popular shows like 'House of Cards' or 'Black Mirror', and they drop allusions to the 'Lannisters' and 'Omar Little' constantly.
