Orders and decorations are necessary in order to dazzle the people.
It is frustrating having to walk through America having to bob and weave people's impressions of me because they see a tall, black guy walking down the street. That is frustrating.
As a person of color, I was just really tired of the fact that I wasn't seeing my story in the culture.
This film isn't about "white racism", or racism at all. DEAR WHITE PEOPLE is about identity. It's about the difference between how the mass culture responds to a person because of their race and who they understand themselves to truly be. And this societal conflict appears to be one that many share.
Sometimes identity can be your salvation. It can be liberating to find your place in the world, but at some point, identity can hold you back.
As a director, I try not to implement a way for working, for every single actor, across the board. I try to work with each one, on an individual basis.
One of the facets of growing up the way I did, I never had the experience of being solely in the black community. Even my family, my mother is what they call Creole, so she's part French, part black, and grew up in Louisiana. It's a very specific kind of blackness that is different than what is traditionally thought of as the black community and black culture. So, I never felt a part of whatever that was.
A man may go to heaven with half the pains it cost him to purchase hell.
The real man smiles in trouble, gathers strength from distress, and grows brave by reflection.
She's like a prisoner inside stone walls, and every day the walls get a little thicker, the doorways a little narrower.
The human brain cannot release enough neurotransmitters to feel emotion a thousand times as strong as the grief of one funeral. A prospective risk going from 10,000,000 deaths to 100,000,000 deaths does not multiply by ten the strength of our determination to stop it. It adds one more zero on paper for our eyes to glaze over.