Art & Creativity Quote by Whoopi Goldberg

Whoopi Goldberg’s line plays like a refusal to audition for anyone’s comfort. “I am an artist” lands first as a credential, but it’s also a shield: she’s claiming a jurisdiction where the usual gatekeeping questions (Who gets to speak? For whom? From what “identity”?) are treated as distractions from the work. Coming from a Black woman who broke through in comedy, film, and daytime television industries that routinely sort performers by marketable categories, the statement reads less like naive idealism and more like a strategic pushback against being packaged.

The clean absolutism of “no color and no sex” is doing double duty. On its face, it echoes the classical, high-minded myth of art’s universality. Underneath, it’s a bargaining move: if you insist on reading her only as “Black” or “female,” you shrink the range of what she can be allowed to do on screen, on stage, or in public life. Goldberg’s career has been a sustained argument that she can play across types, tones, and audiences; the quote tries to pry open that space.

There’s tension baked in, and that’s why it sticks. Art may not have color or sex, but artists do, and institutions certainly do. Goldberg’s line isn’t denying that reality so much as refusing to be reduced by it. It’s an insistence that representation shouldn’t become confinement, and that the price of being “included” can’t be permanent explanation.