Anna Deavere Smith School Quotations

Suddenly in high school, I'm in a predominantly Jewish atmosphere. Jewish people were my gate to white America.

You know if we were to look back and how we were in 1955 living in Jim Crow, living in segregation, living in segregated schools, its hard to believe that it was America, but it really was.

I made a real specific decision when I came out of school and most artists were writing about home - if you were a woman, you were writing about being a woman - and I decided not to do that, write about what you know. That's not what I do. I went as far away from home as possible in terms of the development of my imagination.

Well, the terrible thing right now, and I don't know the statistics, but there's a growing concern in some communities about how rapidly people are sent from school to jail, how quickly they're put into the criminal justice system. And of course the rapidly growing number of brown people, both men and women, in prison. And this is terrible.