Hollywood is designed to check the box office on Monday morning and see: "How'd we do? How much?" It's another facet of this whole culture of accumulation and consumption. Black people are caught up in it, white people are caught up in it, white actors, black actors, female actresses - everybody's caught up in it.

I remember when Langston Hughes used to write a column in black newspapers around this character Jesse B. Semple. He always used that as a voice, sometimes in comic ways, of having everyday people's voice come through this common folk hero, who was an ordinary working guy. He would talk about anything from police brutality to the Korean War. Those kinds of expression and identification are no longer prevalent in our popular culture.

Democracy is about criticism. I didn't elect Obama because he's a black; I voted for Obama because he was the right person at the time. Period. The exceptionalism of a black U.S. President is not important to me. It's what he does. And who he has at the table. And what he does to change the world - that's what's important.

The death penalty is inhumane... whether that person is in a [jail] or it's bin Laden.

In The Black Power Mixtape , you hear the voice of Angela Davis - not someone playing Angela Davis.

I never thought about being an actor. I was just going to play music and baseball. That’s all I was going to do. To this day, that’s what I do. I just added movies to it.

If we talk about the environment, for example, we have to talk about environmental racism - about the fact that kids in South Central Los Angeles have a third of the lung capacity of kids in Santa Monica.