Lena Waithe Quotes

I don't think there is enough understanding of how diverse black America actually is.

I think there's a lot of things that occur within the African-American community, that we would prefer to stay within the African-American community - that we get a little nervous when you start having scenes or dialogue that we know is going to be viewed and heard on a national or global scale.

There haven't been enough profound things written about what being black means and what a black character is. Nobody knows.

Kanye West does not represent all black people.

There is much about the shared terrain of being a black person in the United States that is not seen on small or silver screens or in museums or best-selling books, and much of what gets ignored in the mainstream thrives, and is celebrated, on Twitter.

The black experience isn't exclusively slavery/civil rights/Obama.

One of the most widely read novels by a black American is Ralph Ellison's 'Invisible Man.' It is his masterwork - it won the National Book Award in 1953 and catapulted my man to the highest levels of literary esteem.

I made my first white women friends in college; they loved me and were loyal to our friendship, but I understood, as they did, that they were white women and that whiteness mattered.

I get so tired of people acting like, you know, black men and women never help each other, never support each other.

'The Help' sheds light on a certain truth in America, but the tragedy is if we don't get a chance to contrast it with other points of views. 'The Butler' does that, 'Red Tails' does that and that's what '96 Minutes' does.

And no book gives a deeper insight into the inner life of the Negro, his struggles and his aspirations, than, The Souls of Black Folk.

Blacks' problems lie not in the heads of white people but rather in the wasted and incompletely fulfilled lives of too many black people.

In the 21st century, white America got a wake-up call after 9/11/01. White America and the western world came to realize that people of color had not gone away, faded into the woodwork or just 'disappeared' as the Great White West kept on its merry way of ignoring black concerns.

What's interesting when you see 'Black Panther' is you realize it couldn't have been directed by anybody else but Ryan Coogler. It's a great adventure movie, and it works on all those different levels as entertainment, but it has this kind of cultural through-line that is so specific that it makes it universal.

There is a multitude of experiences that make up the black experience.

I just want to tell black stories.

When I looked at 'Dear White People,' you have four African-American students who are all very different and who are trying to figure out who they are. They're dealing with identity issues and crises. That is exciting to me, to see African-American young people on a page, on a screen, who are so diverse and whose stories are all so different.

When I see the black experience - there's not one, but it is specific, and you can't ignore it.

'Smart, Funny and Black' is about celebrating, critiquing and learning about black culture, black history, and the black experience.

Until black culture as a whole is effectively disentangled from the python-grip of hip-hop, and by extension the street, we are not going to see any real progress.

Steven Spielberg's 'The Color Purple' might as well have been about a bunch of dancing eggplants for all it has to say about black history.

As a black woman, I feel like I have a unique experience that we don't often see in media portrayals of the South.

Every black man in Chicago walks through the world differently, and I think what young black boys do is observe, and that's what gives them their road map.

If you think about it, hip-hop came out of nothing. It was a response to oppression.

BET was a touchstone for me and a lot of my friends - it was a place you could go to see exactly what being black in 1992 and 1996 was like and what it was supposed to look like.