I think it's always been especially hard for black people to let go of musicians who do heinous things because music is such an integral part of our existence.
Once my school was integrated, and I was there with white kids and a few black kids, it really didn't matter to us what we looked like.
In a completely integrated unit where you'd have white soldiers, particularly from southern states, serving under black noncommissioned officers or officers... I think you would have a problem definitely.
I grew up in L.A. in a school that was diverse, but it was not really integrated, so I didn't ever fully fit in with the black girls or the white girls or the Latina girls.
Integration is a man's ability to want to move in there by himself. If someone wants to live in a white neighborhood and he is black, that is his choice. It should be his rights. It is not because white people will not allow him.
My art gets called political, as opposed to my intending it to be political. I think that's something that happens with black artists or marginalized voices trying to speak truth. Because there are things in the status quo to speak out against, speaking out against them will inherently be political.
I have two younger brothers, and I know my parents have spoken to them about driving and interacting with police. They didn't have those conversations with me, but they did have conversations about being exceptional black people.
I use dull colors in my drawings because I started out using a root beer base, because it seemed like an interesting idea, and when it turned out that it worked quite well as an ink, I started using other colors that would complement it, like grays from Higgins black writing ink and, more recently, Dr. P.H. Martin's olive green and vermilion.
The Black Panthers was what we would call today a criminal gang that was formed by Huey Newton. Now, interestingly enough, I knew Huey Newton before he formed the Black Panthers. He was a student of mine when I was a teacher, instructor at Oakland City College back in the very early 1960s.
I want all types of people to look at my work and see themselves, just like I watch a Reese Witherspoon movie as a black woman and can empathize with her because we have had to internalize whiteness in that way to survive.
Artists should be free to create what we want. I believe there's a special value in work that is a reflection of oneself as opposed to interpretation. When I see a film or a TV show about black people not written by someone who's black, it's an interpretation of that life.
In 'Black Panther,' I tried to preserve virtually all versions and interpretations of 'Black Panther' - including the Jack Kirby one, which was really tough to do - and make it work within current continuity.
I'm a strong black woman, and I cannot be intimidated. I cannot be undermined.
In my opinion, I feel like all versions of 'Deathstroke' are valid. Just like with 'Black Panther,' I felt like it wasn't good for a writer to say another writer's work was invalid or never happened.
Both European and American historians have done away with any conceptual limits on what in the past needs and deserves investigating. The result, among other things, has been a flood of works on gender history, black history, and ethnic history of all kinds.
As a Muslim woman, I'm all too familiar with the media shorthand for 'Muslim' and 'woman' equaling Covered in Black Muslim Woman. She's seen, never heard. Visible only in her invisibility under that black burka, niqab, chador, etc.
Despite a rich history of black Americans involved in the Catholic Church, invisibility is a big problem for black Catholics in America.
My mother is Irish, my father is black and Venezuelan, and me - I'm tan, I guess.
Eventually I got the call for 'Iron Man,' and I read sides that had nothing to do with what I did in the movie, and I performed it once while no one was in the room - it was videotaped, and I'm sure Shane Black was watching it from his helicopter or something. And then I got a call the next day that I was going down to shoot it.
The most ironic outcome of the black Civil Rights movement has been the creation of a new black middle class which is increasingly separate from the black underclass.
