Kenya Barris Quotes
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I hear people say, 'I'm not a role model' all the time, and it's like, 'Well, of course you're not!' It doesn't mean that people aren't going to look at you as one, though.
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At my core, I'm shy.
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You can have good times with anyone, but it's really different and much more interesting when you look at how you get through the bad times with someone.
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I think that, for so much of our matriculation through American society, black people sort of feel like outsiders.
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I would say any creative person has that: you can't just force a topic. Whether you're a painter, you want to do a cartoon. Anything. Something may come up that's not your style or suited to what you are working on at the moment. So you file it away and hopefully find a place for it.
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My wife is a doctor, and we had a decent life financially. My kids were going to nice schools and had nannies. We weren't rich, but we were better off than I was growing up. And I looked around, and I was like, 'Who are these people?' It was the opposite of what I remembered growing up.
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The acknowledgement and celebration of Juneteenth as an American and possibly international holiday is something that I would put in the life goals column for me.
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I believe comedy is a really good lens to filter serious issues through. If people are laughing, they don't necessarily realize until they stop laughing that they just took something in that's going to start a conversation.
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Of all the 'Black-ish' characters, Zoey is most like my daughter, who goes to U.S.C.
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We should be aware and constantly having conversations about the world because that's how you change it from the bigger standpoint rather than acutely trying to change things.
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I love Donald Glover.
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I love Meryl Streep.
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I want to start really developing more on the film side.
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My mom went through civil rights; my dad went through civil rights. My name was Kenya because they wanted to give me an African name.
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My father lost a lung in a chemical accident at General Motors, and after a while, he got a settlement that sort of changed all of our lives and moved us from, what we say, 'ashy to classy' in some aspects.
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As much as we want to say racism is dead, it's still rearing its ugly head constantly.
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The small moments I've had to talk with President Obama, I've told him, 'I get it.' His presidency was in some ways almost overshadowed by the fact that he was the first black president.
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The PC way of handling culture has been to not talk about it. But we should be talking about it.
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There has never been a prosecuted case of slavery. There's no criminality to it. So, it was just like, 'It's over,' and thus, because it was over, and it was never considered 'wrong' in the prosecutable, criminal sense of the word, the country doesn't take it as wrong.
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Most importantly, I want my kids to be happy. You're only as happy as your saddest kid.
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You get a little older, and you start understanding the world in a different way and what you don't have control over and what you do have control over.
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And I feel like, as a black man within black culture, I know very well firsthand - as do my parents and my grandparents and great-grandparents - we're used to things not going our way.
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I know a lot for me, personally, the best moments have come from watching my kids have an experience I never thought about as a kid but then remembered as a parent.
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I don't necessarily believe that 'The Cosby Show' should disappear as a cultural reference, but it is. That's sad to me. I understand why. He was a man who possibly did some really bad things, and he should be punished beyond a doubt. But that show, and the impact it had not just on black culture, but culture, was amazing.