A Quote by Salim Akil
I don't walk around all the time thinking of myself as African American, but oftentimes in Hollywood, you are reminded of that in ways that can make you question your viability.
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The Academy just reflects Hollywood. And until we break those barriers, until we have African-American or minority studio executives, 'til we have people who are greenlighting movies with African-American actors - the Academy is not going to change until Hollywood changes, so we have to start with Hollywood.
When it comes to African Americans and African American actors, Hollywood has always felt that if you can make us laugh, that's fine, but we don't need to see you do a 'Schindler's List,' where there's no jokes or music or comedic through-line.
I am African-American, and I am a proud African-American. I just don't like to put myself in a box and say, 'I'm an African-American actress.' I am an American actress, and I can do any kind of role.
I don't regret the fervor, because I do believe, in the African American community but also for other communities, and I know from talking to people, for communities around the world, the election of an African American to the most powerful office on Earth meant things had changed, and not just in superficial ways. That in some irreversible way the world was different.
"Facilitate my thinking" means thinking about who I am as a human being in relation to the world around me. It's how I position myself, how I navigate through this world. That to me is thinking. It is also exhausting to constantly be making art that in some ways responds to the conditions of the world around you. I gave myself permission to turn all of that off, and to lose myself in work.
I came in the gate as an African-American poor kid wanting to be a neurosurgeon but - with American life and the places I was put due to American history and laws and the oppression of black people - I had to make it work in other ways.
I haven't really ever seen a big budget Hollywood film with African music. Most of the time, it's just Hollywood's perception of what African music is.
I've always thought of myself as an African-American comedian, African-American man, everything.
When I was a kid, I'd go to the African-American section in the bookstore, and I'd try and find African-American people I hadn't read before. So in that sense the category was useful to me. But it's not useful to me as I write. I don't sit down to write an African-American zombie story or an African-American story about elevators. I'm writing a story about elevators which happens to talk about race in different ways. Or I'm writing a zombie novel which doesn't have that much to do with being black in America. That novel is really about survival.
Words have consequences, and I judge people not only by their words but what they do. And if you look at people who have a pattern, who've built a career out of dividing people and who built a career out of often not just Obama but finding ways to degrade and diminish African-Americans and African-American leaders. It's racist to consistently make your living on the backs of black people.
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've made it my mission to make movies starring African American actors and about the African American experience and put them in the mainstream. They're very universal stories I've told - every movie I've done.
The weird thing about having your birthday on a school day is that by the time you get to be ten, or eleven for sure, no one at school knows it's your birthday anymore. It's not like when you're little and your mom brings cupcakes for the whole class. But even though no one knows, you walk around like it's supposed to be a national holiday. You walk around thinking that people are supposed to be nice to you, like maybe on your birthday you're ten times more breakable than on any other day. Well, it doesn't work that way. It just doesn't.
I'm excited about my own network, BounceTV. It's the first African-American-owned broadcast network. It's myself, my partner Rob Hardy, and some other African-American businessmen, including Andrew Young and Martin Luther King III.
When African-American police officers involved in a police action shooting involving an African-American, why would Hillary Clinton accuse that African-American police officer of implicit bias?
It takes time for brown people and people of different ethnicities to get into the Hollywood world, which is predominantly Caucasian and African American.
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