The street is as diverse as any other sector, but in peoples' mind it gets appropriated as a black man who's tough. Trying to make it through by staying hard and phallocentric. To me, that is just an impoverished conception of what it is to be a black male. It doesn't do justice to my grandfather, my father, my brother - or just the black men I grew up with.
What had begun as a movement to free all black people from racist oppression became a movement with its primary goal the establishment of black male patriarchy.
I think it's impossible to be a young black male from the South, born to an era I was born in, and not have a clear sense of what race really means in the country.
For a black male, the sound of the blues is pre-Civil Rights. It's oppression.
If I had a son, he'd look like Trayvon.
At the time when I was in college, Oscar Grant had just lost his life in Oakland, Calif. He was an unarmed young black male who had a record. And at the time when his death was making headlines, more people were talking about what he had done in his past than the fact that he unjustly lost his life.
To me "King Kong" is a metaphor for America's fear of the black male. And to me that's obvious. All right? So I mean that was one of the first things I said when I was talking to a friend of mine after he saw Peter Jackson's version of "King Kong."
For me, a hoodie is like a pair of slippers or pyjamas - something comfortable and well-worn that you can wear unthinkingly. Unless, of course, you happen to be a black male.
I was in the 1993 Whitney Biennial and the 1994 'Black Male' show at the Whitney, and I've never seen such vicious press. Twenty plus years later, critics who hated that Biennial have come to Jesus and decided it was a really important, seminal show that they misunderstood.
I love telling the experience of a black male in America, but modern, not always having to go back to a period piece to remind people where we come from. It's more a modern sense of where we are today and where we want to go in the future. So I try to choose projects somewhere around that space.
I hear a creak in my house, and I'm calling the police immediately, but at the same time, I do know that when I call them, I'm going to make sure to say, 'I'm a black guy, and this is my house.'
