African Americans

"As soon as Pence started denying the existence of systemic racism, the fly got him!"

"The working class in the United States has never been united; it’s always been divided along the lines of race. … Racism and capitalism emerged at the same time, in 15th-century western Europe, and they’ve reinforced each other from the beginning."

"I’m still learning, I’m still finding stuff that fascinates me. I’m still putting people out front who I call the “unsung” — those who once had places in history and made a difference, but who have now been forgotten. Because, you know, you bring them back to life [when you write about them], and they live again."

"I enjoy all the different levels of engagement. Whether it’s going to be a slow burn or an instant, raging forest fire depends on the story…"

"There were never any characters that looked like me or my sisters or my girlfriends…Our stories needed to be told."

"He’s hitting hard against what the American societal definition of what being a black man is and also a diasporic Nigerian conception of what being a black man is."

"We don’t even have the power to build a bubble, right? That’s the ultimate story of being who we are and writing about ourselves. We don’t even have the authority to create that bubble."

"A lot of times, as I like to say, I was the only chip in the cookie…I chose to embrace who I am and what I do, and keep my head down and keep writing, and hoped that things would change. But it was lonely in the sense that I was the only."

"I don't hate white folk because I'm a Christian. How can you hate a group of people for being who they are?... Europeans are simply a different breed of human. They are socialized to be aggressive people. They are taught to live by the credo, "survival of the fittest." They are raised to be racist. Caucasians make up only 10 percent of the world's population and that small percentage of people have recessive genes. Therefore they're facing extinction. Whites have tried to level the playing field with the AIDS virus and cloning, but they know these deterrents will only get them so far."

"One of the things I like to say to people is that we think that broadening access in any realm — we do this with everything, by the way. It’s such an American way to approach the world. We think that broadening access will broaden access on the terms of the people who have benefited from it being narrowed, which is just so counterintuitive. Broadening access doesn’t mean that everybody has the experience that I, privileged person, had in the discourse. Broadening it means that we are all equally uncomfortable, right? That’s actually what pluralism and plurality is. It isn’t that everybody is going to come in and have the same comforts that privilege and exclusion had extended to a small group of people. It’s that now everybody sits at the table, and nobody knows the exact right thing to say about the other people."

"It troubles me that our worth is measured against what white people in power care about on a given day, week, month. The stories of my people are evergreen. I will write about them for a lifetime."

"The reason why I fell in love with being a playwright and why I fell in love with theatre is because I grew up in it. My first poem was published at six and called “I Am Stronger than Hate.” I proclaimed then that, “I am stronger than hate, I will open the gate, the gate to a kingdom of love, it doesn’t matter what your race, or the color of your face. I am stronger than hate,” and of why I am a poet and playwright. This work is about community."

"…more than half the struggle is putting the pencil to the paper and trusting. If trust is too hard right now, know that page is the one place where you can always go back and use your eraser."

"It’s a text and movement conjuring of Latina archetypes and the women who embody them— past, present, and future. There are archetypes/stereotypes that are often placed upon Latinas (i.e. La Virgen, La Llorona, hot tempered, sexy, etc.) and I wanted to know what happens if the images we think we understand are, in fact, more complicated and more human than we thought? And then what happens if those “images” not only talk to us, but each other too?..."

"Chicago for me means life. I have lived in Chicago all my life. It keeps calling me back even though I have tried to escape. Chicago is a city filled with some of the most corruption and also some of the most courageous and successful organizing resistance overall. Chicago will always affect how I represent myself when I travel. It is home…"

"I was like, “Man, young people in Chicago need to hear these young people in Ferguson articulate that, because that’s so powerful for young people to come to that political awakening on their own—outside of academia, outside of institutions that they’ve been denied access to.” And so we were really inspired to build with them. And we came back the next week and asked them if we could launch a pop-up gallery on their campsite. So we printed the photos that we had taken the week before, we brought down easels, and we created a pop-up gallery on the camp site—that was sort of the first gesture, the first portal of this loose collective of artists that would later become #LetUsBreathe, using art as an access point for political education and engagement, turning the Ferguson protest’s occupation into an art gallery…"

"My inspiration for this play derives from a combination of my personal and the collective grief around the mass shooting in the United States. These incidents made me pay attention to the National conversation around the topic of gun violence. On social media I constantly read “lone white shooter” and I started to think about the cycle of how news is dispersed, interpreted, re-dispersed and reinterpreted. This cycle is destructive. From this news, what assumptions do we make about the shooter? About the victims? And about the moments between gunshots?..."

"I believe that every culture contributes to fashion. But, I do remember Polly Mellen telling me, 'You know where we got hot pants from? We used to go up to Harlem and we would just look at what all the community people were wearing.'"

"…I tell them the funny stories of the models trying to knock me off of the runway. They are laughing and giggling. I get them. Then we do a fashion show. I get them walking and strutting, and we have fun. Not only is it a fashion show, but we also talk about who they are and what they wish for. I’ll ask an 11-year-old girl to give me one of three wishes, and she’ll say, “That my mother believes me.” Heartbreaking. I would imagine it’s stemmed from some of the altercations in my life with abuse. I always tell them that I get more out of this than they do."

"…For acting, I have no other place to begin besides my body, history, memories, and cultural points of reference. In my process, I’m my foundation and then the research, and additional character development gets layered on top. For writing, I admit I’ve got an agenda and I start from what I know—me…"

"Coco Chanel said something like, “When you’re getting ready to go out, take off one thing.” I think it’s similar with dialogue. Cut it off. Don’t say too much, because then it gets to a place where it’s not natural. Most people don’t go on and on for sentences in real life. Also, when two characters are in a space that’s emotionally raw, they can’t always articulate everything. They’re talking, but not saying the right things. Another thing is to never let people directly answer each other’s questions if you’re trying to create tension."

"Absolutely has the particularity of African-American experience. But I feel strongly that this kind of experience is not so different from other people’s experiences. This is about a particular time and place, but I think there are so many other resonances here to other kinds of experiences. And that to me is the beauty of reading. As a reader, you know the gut of it and say, ‘I get this,’ and I’ve felt like that, too."

"I think it is a natural impulse to look to your own past and history to discover the stories that move and inspire you. The problem is that the past is nebulous and waiting for a shape. What ultimately gives it form and context is the present. That’s the part of writing inspired by personal history that is exciting to me."

"Humor is absolutely necessary to keep going…So many of the people in my family and my community were wonderful storytellers. They would tell stories about just awful things that happened to them. But their humor made what happened into their own kind of triumph."

"Don’t let anyone “should” all over you and don’t “should” all over yourself. Writers: nobody knows the story you want to tell better than you do. You get to decide what feedback serves you and the rest of it you can leave behind…"

"For generations in this country, beauty was traditionally represented by three very distinct ideals in virtually all media: blond hair, blue eyes and fair skin...My cover shattered that notion forever….Women of color could boldly say to the world, ‘Hey, look at me! I’m here and I have value and I am beautiful.'"

"At my moment, there was always a token black person. And in the ’70s I became that token black person. It brings out the worst in people when they think there’s only one spot, where for everyone else there are lots of spots."

"I’m proud of young black america. I’m proud of them, even if they are misunderstood. I’m proud of them for using their voices, their way. Racism, classism, fear, it all exists. Still. It’s here, embedded into the fibers of our society. But I have to be honest, I do believe that because of technology, no matter how problematic it can be, and the rapid spreading of information, I’d like to believe there is a slow awakening occurring, and that our babies, or at least the generation after them will have a very different reality here. I know my role is to do what so many have done before me in this tradition — tell the stories, unashamed and unafraid."

"Hip-hop saved me,. It gave me permission to use language in a certain way. It validated my community and my friends. It gave our slang a certain elegance. I have a chip on my shoulder I pet every morning, a constant feeling like I have something to prove. Hearing that the canon can’t be diversified, there’s no room for more brown faces—that fueled my fire. I loved music that people said was not music, that it was too violent, too crass, too sexual. And now everyone in the world is rapping Hamilton."

"It's hard to be what you can't see."

"Who else is there to write for, as far as I’m concerned. I’d rather go ahead and tap into these kids, who still are malleable, but who also have insight into things that we don’t know, with vision that we no longer have; who have imaginations that have already been zapped from us."

"It totally matters to me that teenagers think I'm cool. I mean, teens keep their fingers on the pulse of culture. When things shift, it's usually because they shift them. They call the shots. So if teenagers think I'm cool, then hopefully they'll want to get down with whatever I'm doing. My hope is that reading and writing becomes the new "waiting in line to buy Jordans.""

"The truths are universal: Every kid knows fear. Every kid knows family and friendship. Loss, love, laughter. Everything else is just detail."

"I love these kids. I’m just here to bear witness to their lives, because I believe that it is in bearing witness that everything is made real."

"A great writer in the purest sense...makes my head bop from side to side."

"My uncle used to say that the good books begin with “… and shots rang out.” Shots rang out is a cliché, but what he meant is that no one has time for you to get us to the minefield. Drop us in the midfield in the beginning. Drop us off in the mix and you can move backward and forward from there. End in the mix. Don’t answer any questions. Leave me in the muck at the end, too. There can be less muck, but all the loose ends shouldn’t be tied up. There should be something unreconciled. That’s life. Nobody’s life is tied up in a bow. Stories that end in a bow are kind of disrespectful to the reader. If you want your story to be compelling, let it fade to black without reconciliation."

"If you are neutral in situations of injustice, you have chosen the side of the oppressor."

"…And I just remember the pain – the pain of the lost friend but also the pain of meeting a part of myself that I didn’t know existed. A part of myself that could lose control to the point where I could commit a murder. That’s a very human thing. I think that most of us don’t ever meet that part of ourselves that exists within all of us. This rage that, when triggered, will cause you to do things that you don’t necessarily understand that you’re doing."

"…Young people – especially young men – it’s not that they hate reading, it’s that they hate boredom. So my thing was: I need to write a story that is interesting, that is gripping, that can connect to them and their experiences, and write something that’s not very intimidating, because there’s so much white space."

"The damage suffered by people I know and love is almost always based on the trauma of the only elder they had treating them badly or being interested only in their silence. And what you’re left with, by the grace of God and some miracle, is this inner self. Our experiences are painful and sometimes annihilating, and if we have the strength to crawl out of and excavate that wreckage, we have to ask ourselves how to describe the truth of it."

"I don't expect it to be easy, but I'm certain it will be fruitful. My mission is to take a different approach: Instead of explicitly encouraging young people to read, my goal is to get them to see the value in their own narratives — that they, too, have a story, and that there's power not just in telling it, but in the opportunity to do so."

"I think I was just a very skinless person…And I had this terrible need to confess; and I still do it…It’s a bid to be loved, in some way."

"I'm writing the West that exists. You have to remember that Westerns are complete mythology. If you talk about the historic West, a third of the cowboys were black. The railroad was built by the Irish and the Chinese ... and black workers. All of this supported by women, all the time, and yet you can find any number of Westerns that have no women in them."

"I have no desire to offer a political message in a novel. An artist cannot hide from her or his political beliefs; they will be in the work. But to presume that I am smart enough to preach a position runs counter to my artistic sense."

"People are like, "Well it's not standard English." So what? Standard English is for standard people."

"In order to write anything profile-driven, I would become the person; and then I would analyse the person from within. Earlier, I would analyse them from without. But if I was going to write about him now, I would do it internally, so then it would be fiction.”"

"I think it means where the artist doesn’t necessarily have a full understanding of something, but they have deep empathy. They have some kind of amazing empathy with the characters in the world. I just think it means being openhearted and generous. I think that to be a conscious person is to sort through stuff in order to understand not just yourself but how you feel in the world."

"There are two ways to approach the race thing. One is the unfortunate marginalization of American writers who happen to be black by calling them “black writers,” which tacitly acknowledges the existence of something else that would be mainstream, and so ghettoizes the work immediately. That is the unfortunate part. If one allows that, one fails to acknowledge the truth that there is no such thing as a “black American experience”…"

"I get to whisper to them, "I love you, I see you, I know. I know you're scared, and it's OK to be scared, and if you can't be scared out there you can be scared in here. Within the pages of this book, you can be who you wholly are." And perhaps that might be empowering enough to at least add a bit of significance to their lives."

"The interesting thing about irony for me is that real irony is far more sincere than earnestness. To accept the absurdity of a situation is to accept the humanness of it. Utter sincerity suggests a kind of belief that one knows all there is to know about a given circumstance. That is not to say that one should ever make light of serious and grave and important issues, but that open and genuine intellectual curiosity should never be a casualty in any situation. Irony is not always funny. Humor is not always ironic."