One thing that sticks in my mind is that jazz means freedom and openness. It's a music that, although it developed out of the African American experience, speaks more about the human experience than the experience of a particular people.
My first American experience was in the harbor of New York City when I saw that amazing big, tall lady. I remember thinking, 'Oh my goodness, a lady runs this country.'
The American experience influenced my understanding of individuality, basic human rights, freedom of expression and the rights and responsibilities of citizens.
Throughout every presidency since the heist of our country from indigenous peoples, the black American experience has been exceptional in its discomfort. And no chief executive of this great nation has, in earnest, developed a unique plan to remedy that discomfort.
As much as I think it is necessary and desirable for white people to have an expanded view of the black American experience, it's probably even more important for black people to have that expanded view.
Immigration is as much about the American experience and the values we share, and a lot more about economics than it is about politics.
Hip-hop in Africa has been very often a duplication of an American experience, but in a context that's totally alien to it.
It used to be that the highest ambition of American novelists was to write 'the Great American Novel,' that great white whale of American fiction that would encompass all the American experience in one great book.
The African-American experience is one of the most important threads in the American tapestry.
Undeniably the American art form, too. And yet more and more, we see films made that diminish the American experience and example. And sometimes trash it completely.
I decided early on that I wanted to participate in the greater American experience, rather than the parochial one in Mississippi. But I have an urge as a writer to meld the Southern experience into the larger American one.
We can not continue to allow this over reliance on government to replace the cornerstone institution that has made the American experience possible.
There's a misconception that I can't relate to the quote-unquote 'Asian-American experience' because I didn't grow up with an Asian mom and dad. And that's just not true. I am Asian American, and so playing a girl who is half Korean, half white, but her white dad tried really hard to connect with her mom's heritage - that's very familiar to me.
There are aspects of Asian culture in my work, but it's really rooted in an American experience - transcendentalism, '60s counterculture, punk rock.
There is an imagined thing called black culture. But culture is a construction. It is learned behavior, not innate. The black American experience is the American experience.
I speak Dutch, German, French, and English and have acted in all of those languages, but I love the American experience.
Were I to be appointed Secretary of Education, I'd issue a prospectus for a compulsory nationwide high school course called 'The American Experience in Art.'
History will judge harshly my Republican colleagues who deny the science of climate change. Similarly, those Democrats who would use climate change as a basis to regulate out of existence the American experience will face the harsh reality that their ideas will fail.
National Parks are a part of the American experience. They evoke memories of childhood vacations and pride in the beauty of our national landscapes. They are also reminders that if these parks are to remain beautiful and accessible, we have a responsibility as a nation to maintain and protect them.
The thing is, so much of the African American experience is about the redefinition of roots because of slavery. We were uprooted, and there's so much about our whole legacy that was stolen and that we lost in the Transatlantic slave trade that we'll never find out.
