In black neighborhoods, everybody appreciated comedy about real life. In the white community, fantasy was funnier. I started looking for the jokes that were equally hilarious across the board, for totally different reasons.
The fact is, in the minds of many, Trayvon Martin received the appropriate punishment for a true crime: He was black, male and dared to walk outside. In life, young Trayvon was just a teenager; in death, he has been transformed into a scary, lurking, suspicious, prone-to-violence spook.
In the locker room, and when I'm with my friends, we use racial slurs... What I do with my black friends is not up to white America to dictate to me what's appropriate and inappropriate.
My favorite video game of all time is called 'Black Tiger'. It's a Capcom Dungeons and Dragons game from 1987. I have the actual arcade version sitting in my office.
All my playmates on the farm were black, and later, when I started school in Plains, it was all white. But I was always eager to get back home to my friends in Archery.
From about 700 B.C. to A.D. 500, the vast territory of Scythia, stretching from the Black Sea to China, was home to diverse but culturally related nomads. Known as Scythians to Greeks, Saka to the Persians, and Xiongnu to the Chinese, the steppe tribes were masters of horses and archery.
I remember 'The Norfolk Journal and Guide,' which is a black newspaper that still exists, but it was really influential, as you can imagine, in the Forties, Fifties, and Sixties. But all of their archives are online and digitized, and it was a really great resource.
Since Brooks Brothers is a 189-year-old company, there are plenty of references and inspirations I can draw from their archives and catalogs. The wearer of Black Fleece may not be all that different from mine, in that I imagine that it would be someone who is a true individual, and independent thinker. This is for both men and women.
In the suffragist and abolitionist era, there were a lot of white women and some black men and women who argued for the old hierarchy and against universal adult suffrage - often on religious grounds.
I sometimes apply eyeliner - Giorgio Armani Smooth Silk Eye Pencil in #1 Black - and smudge it with my fingers really quickly to give it a little lift, almost a cat eye. It's all about giving a lift now.
The first 'Half-Life' movie treatment pitched to us climaxed with a tearful reunion between enslaved Vortigaunts and their Vortiwives and children. The last one I saw had Black Mesa invaded by a cavalry unit, just so as to feature a scene of bullsquids tearing into armored horses.
I always tried to stand out as a ref. I wore a long-sleeve black Under Armour t-shirt so that you knew I was the cool ref as opposed to the old dude.
One of the reasons why I created the podcast called the 'The Call-In' that we do through Array - because as a black artist, every time I sit down with mainstream media, I'm asked about issues of race, identity and culture. No one asked what they ask my white male counterparts, which is: 'Where do you like to put the camera?'
It's true that eviction affects the young and the old, the sick and the able-bodied. It affects white folks and black folks and Hispanic folks and immigrants. If you spend time in housing court, you see a really diverse array of folks there.
Certainly I feel like I'm the tip of the arrow at times because certainly the national media wants to talk about the fact that I'm a black Republican and some people think of that as zany that a black person would be a conservative but to me what is zany is any person black, white, red, brown or yellow not being a conservative.
Black literature is taught as sociology, as tolerance, not as a serious, rigorous art form.
If it's lawful to have a rifle club to kill pheasants, it should be just as lawful to have one to kill wolves or dogs that are being sicked on little black babies. In fact, it's constitutional. Article Number Two of the constitution guarantees the right of every citizen to own a rifle or a shot gun.
Fox News never calls up Bobby Seale to articulate a stance in opposition to right-wing conservatives. To me, giving the New Black Panthers a platform on Fox is a subtle tactic to scare people.
I am not a black artist, I am an artist.
There is not a liberal America and a conservative America - there is the United States of America. There is not a black America and a white America and latino America and asian America - there's the United States of America.
