A Quote by Ahmad Rashad
I wanted to represent African-American athletes in a better way than what I saw when I grew up.
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My earliest memory of the Olympics was watching the 1996 Games in Atlanta. I remember everyone being so excited to watch. Seeing the American athletes on the podium, I saw myself. I knew that that was what I wanted to do. I wanted to be one of those athletes on the podium representing their country and bringing home medals.
On the mission I brought a flag from China, I brought the stone sculpture from Hong Kong, and I brought a scroll from Taiwan. And what I wanted to do is, because as I was going up and I am this Chinese-American, I wanted to represent Chinese people from the major population centers around the world where there are a lot of Chinese people. And so, I wanted to bring something from each of those places and so it really wasn't a political thing and I hope people saw it that way. I was born here, I was raised in the U.S., and I'm an American first, but also very proud of my heritage.
I grew up on the beach and I grew up surfing and I grew up swimming in this very genuine beach town back in Australia, and it's just something I really want to reflect in my lifestyle and in the way I am, the way I represent myself, the way I dress and the music that I make.
The ability to be the first African-American painter to paint the first African-American president of the United States is absolutely overwhelming. It doesn't get any better than that.
I'm a kid who grew up in an all African-American neighborhood and got into schools and aspired to just be me, and didn't worry about labels or anything. Just wanted to be a success at what I did.
One of the reasons that the African American actors wanted to be a part of the show was because these people are talking to each other the way that African American people talk to each other, and they said that they didn't see that on TV.
I didn't mind being in a school with a small African-American population. The African-American-community was very tight, and that was great. But I also wanted to interact with other types of folks.
Growing up where I grew up, we looked to athletes. They were our first heroes. They came from the same places we came from. I mean, you can't watch TV and see someone who is successful that you can really relate to. That person isn't real; he doesn't exist. But athletes traveled the world, had these big houses and gave their families a better life.
My Native American heritage was not embraced by our family, and we grew up African-American, so I didn't have a lot of access or history to that line of my family.
When I grew up I saw females doing certain things, and I thought I had to do that exactly. The female rappers of my day spoke about sex a lot . . . and I thought that to have the success they got, I would have to represent the same thing. When in fact I didn’t have to represent the same thing.
I mean, the greatest athletes in the world are African-American.
I think that I represent people that sometimes don't have a voice because of how they grew up or where they grew up or the options that were given to them. I was able to kick my way out of that, but we have a real class problem in this country, where it's hard to jump classes.
I grew up on particular movies that said something to me as a kid from Missouri, movies that showed me places I'd yet traveled, or different cultures, or explained something, or said something in a better way than I could ever say. I wanted to find the movies like that. It was less about a career than finding the films I wanted to see.
I grew up in a working class family where there was no health insurance. I saw first hand the fracturing of the American dream and the bitterness that comes when there is no hope and a lot of despair. So I wanted to build the company, in a sense, that my father never got a chance to work for.
I only became an actor to get your attention, to challenge the archetype of an African American male; I can't be anything else in this lifetime than an African American man.
I'm one of the few Black writers, or African American writers, who managed to work my way through the system so that it has allowed me to speak in a kind of free way. But most African American writers don't have that. They don't have that opportunity, they don't have that.
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