Since I got to this country when I was 12, I've been obsessed with this idea of whiteness and blackness because I realized I was neither. For me, it was so important to me to make a film that focused on whiteness because you wouldn't have blackness if you didn't have whiteness.
The privileged position of whiteness doesn't allow for someone with one drop of Negro blood to be considered white, which allows whiteness to be a fairly pure category while blackness has to absorb an expansive reality of representation.
I always feel like I'm warring with my womanhood and wanting the world to be better, and with my blackness - which is the opposite of whiteness.
Im not really about blackness, per se, but about blackness and whiteness, and what they mean and how they interact with one another and what power is all about.
I stand on the black side of issues, philosophically, politically, socially, and for me to not check that box, I felt like, would be some sort of betrayal of not only who I am but also the community I affiliate with.
I am not renouncing my blackness and going on about my day. I am rejecting the legitimacy of the entire racial construct in which blackness functions as one orienting pole.
The very definition of 'blackness' is as broad as that of 'whiteness,' yet we're seemingly always trying to find a specific, limited definition.
The anti-blackness has generated new forms of youth involvement in anti-whiteness, which in some cases is appalling.
I think the idea that you're somehow rejecting whiteness if you don't identify yourself as biracial is odd because everybody engages in whiteness. If you live in America, you're doing whiteness all the time, even if you have no white people in your family.
If whiteness were of no particular advantage, then having a fuller color wheel of skin tones would be purely a matter of celebration. But whiteness - just a drop of it - does still carry privilege. You learn that very young in America.
[defines a madman as] a man who preferred to become mad,in the socially accepted sense of the word, rather than forfeit a certain superior idea of human honor.
I am philosophically opposed to raising the retirement age. I misspoke and said I was not philosophically opposed.
Whatever happens, my audience mustn't know whether I am spoofing or being serious; and likewise I mustn't know either. I am in a constant interrogation; when does the deep and philosophically valid Dali begin, and where does the looney and preposterous Dali end?
In America, mixed-race identity tends to invite both curiosity and suspicion, largely because few have found a way to interrogate it without centering whiteness as the scale by which to evaluate blackness.
As the blackness of the night recedes so does the nadir of yesterday. The child I am forgets so quickly.
It's better to have your blackness taken away than to stand and lie about who you actually are.