Work

The worst thing about Daylight Savings is that clocks now set themselves, so I can’t lie about why I’m late on Monday.

My mother saved our home with a minimum wage job. But in the 1960s, a minimum wage job would support a family of three above the poverty line. Not today. Not even close. I understood right then that people can work hard, they can play by the rules, and they can still take a hard smack.

In colleges, there are no gender separations in courses of study, and students can freely choose their majors. There are no male and female math classes. But women generally choose college courses that pay less in the labor market. Those are the choices that women themselves make. Those choices contribute to the pay gap…

I work very physically as an actor. The biggest thing for me has been the challenge of how to be this person with the personal transformation that's going on for me physically... That hasn't been easy. It's been an awesome challenge for me… because so much of how I access character is through my body.

I think Hillary Clinton has juggled so many jobs in her life that adding grandmother to her bio would not deter her from running.

50 years later we need to have a conversation…not just about civil rights, C-I-V-I-L, but about silver rights, S-I-L-V-E-R. That is to say: economic rights, economic freedoms. Black folk lag behind in every leading economic category 50 years later, even in the Obama era. And the bottom line is this: if you don’t have economic freedom, you really ain’t free.

We’re definitely blessed to get a scholarship to our universities, but at the end of the day, that doesn’t cover everything. We do have hungry nights that we don’t have enough money to get food.

I got to be a leader of HHS during these most historic times. We are on the front lines of a long overdue national change — fixing a broken health system. Now, this is the most meaningful work I’ve ever been a part of. In fact, it’s been the cause of my life. And I knew it wouldn’t be easy. There’s a reason that no earlier President was successful in passing health reform, despite decades of attempts.

I gotta tell you, I do not envy whoever they try to put in David Letterman’s chair. Folks those are some huge shoes to fill, and some really big pants.

Standardized tests are an indicator of the kind of service taxpayers are receiving — and whether schools, educators and policymakers are doing their jobs. In the United States, taxpayers spend almost $600 billion annually on public education, so it’s not unreasonable to ask what all that money is producing. In fact, it’s irresponsible not to know.

I will promise you that if I can give you two good scenes -- which is what I always try to do in every movie -- then I feel like I'm doing my job.

¦I was really tested, but afterwards I was euphoric, because I thought, ‘wow, I just had to fly by the seat of my pants, interview the president of The United States. I didn’t ask him about his favorite color or his favorite meal at the White House - I actually talked to him about real things, and I survived. Phew!’