Through theater and acting school, I found a way to articulate myself.
I mean, the acting school I went to, we did have a social experience, but you know, when it's a bunch of actors, it's everyone self-consciously having a social experience rather than just having a social experience.
I remember getting out of acting school and friends of mine talking about, like, 'You know, I don't think I'm gonna do TV.' Like, people putting on these airs of being picky. And I was never a snob about it.
Acting school was summer camp, and I needed concentration camp. I had so many different ideas swirling between culture and how to tie things together.
When I went to acting school, the kids that got the best grades were the kids that could cry on cue. But it didn't really translate into careers for any of them, because the external is the easy part.
When you're 20 and you're in acting school and your teachers tell you that 95 percent of actors are unemployed for twenty years, you think it doesn't apply to you. But it does take twenty years to become real, because that's what you have to do to be an interesting actor.
When I got out of acting school, I was lucky to have gotten any job at all. A lot of people hiring African American actresses - it was right after 'Roots,' and for society, not me, it was great. Nice richly dark-skinned people was the fashion, and I was not.
I talk about race a lot. It's been my work ever since I came out of acting school. But it's true that in a way talking about race is a taboo. Because so many of our debates about race have to do not with race but with what we are willing to see, what we will not see and what we don't want to see.
I was going to be in an acting school in London, and then I promptly got thrown out of an acting school in London. Well, it wasn't that I got thrown out as much as I was not invited back, which is the same thing, just more polite.
Sometimes when I'm not working, I go and teach at an acting school, and quite selfishly, that makes me feel more inspired to do things myself.
