I always considered myself bi-racial, because I didn't want to disconnect from either side, and I felt very strongly about that. Now, I understand that the world sees me as a black woman, a person of color, and I'm okay with that.
I was raised in a completely black world. In those days, if a white woman married a black man, she lived as a black woman, and that was just the end of it. So, I don't have a feeling of being bi-racial. I don't have a connection to it. People often come up to me thinking I do have a connection to it, and I kind of let them down because I really don't.
For so long, black conservatives have not been able to have a voice; people who have bi-racial children, people in bi-racial relationships, it has been so black and white. I blame Obama. His eight years in office did a lot of damage in terms of race relations in this country.
'Smart Funny & Black' came about because I felt that black comedians were being considered as only capable of a certain type of comedy - sort of physical, kind of silly - and I felt like we are not a monolith, and our comedy isn't, either.
I used to joke for years that I was a black man. I adopted the black culture, the black race. I married a black woman, and I had black kids. I always considered myself a 'brother.'
If you are a woman, if you are a person of color, if you are gay, lesbian, bisexual, transgender, if you are a person of size, if you are person of intelligence, if you are a person of integrity, then you are considered a minority in this world.
When I think about women of color and their place politically in the world and culture... they've had two layers of just garbage to overcome. To me, a black woman is a woman-woman.
I've always considered myself a person of color.
Any movement that has been successful in this country for Black liberation has included old and young, men and women, and people not of color that understand their superiority complex, that understand White supremacy, and that internalize that, sort that out, and heal from that in order that they might help, because there are some people of color that are not on our side.
The person that always comes to mind, and it's odd now because we've become pals, is Ben Folds. I've always considered him like a musical older brother, from afar, in the sense that I always felt I had a much better understanding of what he was singing about five years after I was listening to it.
In the films I've done recently, I've been learning a little more about the side of myself that enjoys being a light. I remember when I used to dress in all black and you'd say. "Just be pretty, hold your head up, be proud. Be a pleasant person and don't cover yourself so much with darkness, your need to be a little crazy." Now I have nothing against anything I've been in before, because I love all sides of me, but I have been experimenting more with that lovely woman side. In this age of feminism, I would hate for the whole gentlemen and ladies things to be lost.
It's not a cis-man becoming a cis-woman. It's a trans person just being who they want to be. This is how I've always felt, and this is who I've always been. But so much focus is put on the transition or the change because it's so visible. But that's not even what it is... That's who that person's been and who they are now.
We live in an uncertain world and we want to believe that what a man is and what a woman is-I know that. And people don't want to critically interrogate the world around them. Whenever I'm afraid of something or I'm threatened by something, it's because it brings up some sort of insecurity in me. I think the reality is that most of us are insecure about our gender. They think, 'Okay, if there's this trans person over here, then what does that make me?
I always wanted to be an actress. And it wasn't ego. I felt so little about myself, considered myself such a sparrow. Not just my size. I thought I was so plain... I did plays not to show off but because if I did that - I didn't realize it at the time - I would be somebody other than this person I didn't really approve of.
I do want to be a representative of the African community, and I want to hold myself and dress myself in a way that reflects that. I want black kids to see me and think, 'Okay, he's carrying himself as a black man, and that's how a black man should carry himself.'
It's important to me that the reader goes on a ride with the characters, that you set context enough to know, "Okay, here's where we are in the world. Now we're just going to go inside this person's head, this guy's heart, this woman's ambitions and take it down to very, very small scale."
You want to be leaders and you're black and I'm here to tell you how to do it. Disconnect from this social media garbage; disconnect from these celebrity athletes who don't really care nothing about you.