My mother always tells me, "Fear isn't from God," and I believe that. But sometimes, I wonder whether I'll be able step into the shoes that God has prepared for me.
It's therapy. [people] say true healing requires honest confrontation, and that can be seen on a macro scale with America and the things that have been swept under the rug, whether it be with the native Americans or slavery, or whatever holocaust that's happened on this soil.
Trying to convince someone that they are a racist or they have White Privilege - if it's in the air they breathe and the culture supports them, sometimes they never have to think about it at all.
I'm a work in progress. I'm trying to be better.
I want young people to ask me if I'm serious. Our young people have been lied to and misled for so long. When I stand on this soapbox, I want young people to ask me that because once they know I'm serious, they'll be willing to ride with me.
I'm not perfect, I'm a flawed man, but I'm willing to try to get better, I'm willing to listen.
When an artist becomes complacent, he dies.
I got work to do. I got a lot of work to do within myself.
I need to take toward a lot of things that will refine me and make me better suited for leading anyone out of any place of injustice to a place of justice.
Sadly, black people disassociate ourselves from the things which make us who we are, identifying them as lesser, or inferior. It's a form of self hate.
And when I say dominate, I just mean work harder than anyone else could possibly work at it.
When you're in a relationship with someone you have to be in control of that relationship and you have to be as open as you can about everything, straight up, out the gate.
I think it's like the '60s - we're going to see another revolution in film where these new filmmakers stand up and take ownership of what film is and mould it into what they want.
I prefer to make movies which not only have a message for "then" but a message for "now."
If I don't know how to swim and two weeks later I know how to swim, I know how to swim.
When I walk home at night I don't have to worry about anything. But when a woman walks home at night she gotta think about a lot of different things.
Every day I'm reassessing what I've been taught against what I see, and the man I need to be if I'm going to call myself a leader of anybody.
We kind of reduce our responsibility to not saying the N-word and to condemning the Klansmen, rather than saying many of our celebrated institutions are systemically racist. Many of our institutions that deal with law enforcement or controlling the bodies of Black people are systemically racist. Many of our educational institutions are systemically racist. Many of our corporate institutions are systemically racist. We don't have those conversations, so things don't change.
I'm trying to transform behaviors and ideas that have never been challenged in certain ways in my life. I'm not the kid that I was at 19.
In all actuality, we got to do better about preparing our men for their interactions with women.
When I think about 1999, I think about being a 19-year-old kid, and I think about my attitude and behavior just toward women with respect objectifying them.
A lot of those old ideas are dying with the people who created them, and there's this new generation of filmmaker that's saying, "We're in this together, these are issues that we all deal with, let's just present issues to screen without bias and figure out what the audience has to say about them."
If a person was accused of being a racist when he was young - he said some racially insensitive thing or someone had him on tape calling someone the n-word or whatever - and then you fast forward and he feels, Oh, back then I didn't say this or that. He's not thinking about the person that he hurt when he said what he said, or however it came out, or the effects that it could have had. He's not thinking about it. He's thinking about his own self and how he feels.
Self-esteem and identity are very fragile things. I think a lot of times, those are the motivations for why people do take their own lives - not being seen, not being recognized, not being loved, not feeling supported, not feeling understood.
Because we are a conglomerate of our experiences - you take away any experience and you take away a piece of identity. You take away a piece of identity and we don't really know who we are.
