I try to find hope in struggle and resistance in small places as much as I can.
We have to be that wedge that drives the question and asks the hard questions.
If we talk about literacy, we have to talk about how to enhance our children’s mastery over the tools needed to live intelligent, creative, and involved lives.
Every day of my life I walk with the idea that I am black, no matter how successful I am. And our success is tempered by that; you’re successful in this way given the fact you are black, and most blacks don’t get to that point.
I’ve been a Goodwill Ambassador for the UNICEF and the UNICEF family for more than twelve years.
Im a child of the Civil Rights Movement.
Every day of my life I walk with the idea I am black no matter how successful I am.
I never thought about being an actor.
What happened to Haiti is a threat that could happen anywhere in the Caribbean to these island nations, you know, because of global warming, because of climate change and all this.
If we look at Houston, which is a very environmentally toxic place, we find that it has one of the highest levels of young men going to prison and also among the highest levels of illiteracy in the country.
Some of these things I saw in foreign films – African films, Cuban films – long before I decided to really go on this course as an actor. I started to think about what values I saw in those films that I wanted to bring to my projects.
Since 1957, black people have experienced double-digit unemployment – in good times and bad times. Look at the population of African Americans in prison. They represent more than half the population of prisoners in the country, 55 percent of those on death row.