Quotes About Stereotypes

I was very against pink and purple when I was young, because they were girls' colors. But that was only because I didn't want people to write me off for what I can do. When I got into my 20s, I decided that was stupid.

People tend to think that I know less about what I'm talking about than I actually do - usually people who think that all aristocrats are stupid.

I've heard that I've gotten a lighter complexion, as if I've bleached my skin. I think that is so stupid and ludicrous. For those who want to bleach their skin, that's fine. I just didn't bleach mine. I'm a black woman. I don't want to be anything but a black woman.

A lot of improvisers mistakenly assume stand-up is awful, because there are a lot of stand-ups in the world that did not appeal to me. It was so easy to make a blanket statement when I was improvising only: 'Stand-up's terrible.' It's so ignorant and stupid to do that. But it's easy to do that. So that's where I came from.

I'm not sure a pretty and stupid man might be the key to a happy relationship.

For a while, I thought, maybe I should direct, until I got to New York and saw the stupidity of that idea. If it's hard to get into acting, what is it like for a woman to become a director?

I have a problem with people saying feminine means anti-feminist, and I think it's counter-productive to immediately associate anything 'girly' with vanity or stupidity.

There are all these scripts where the women, if they're working, are prostitutes and lawyers with an angry streak who'll kill you. It's a reaction to women leaving their men and men being angry about it and saying it on some subconscious level.

I thought that I wouldn't be able to make it because I'm a girl, but I think it was just a subconscious feeling. Pretty much every gig I went to was a band with four dudes.

Codes and signals are as important as explicit messages, and the two are linked. The bore pressing someone to tell them 'where they're really from' will see themselves as different to the aggressive stranger barking at someone to 'get back to their own country,' but the subconscious, if not explicit, message is the same.

I realized that I was African when I came to the United States. Whenever Africa came up in my college classes, everyone turned to me. It didn't matter whether the subject was Namibia or Egypt; I was expected to know, to explain.

Expectations that black directors have to make black films about black subject matter are, to me, kind of absurd.

My straight friends accept I'm gay but they forget that some people don't. Even now, if I go into a party, people don't usually assume I'm gay, so you have to keep coming out. And if you say you've got a film with a gay subject matter, you can sometimes see people's eyes going, 'Oh! OK!'

There is an outdated belief that girls are not as good at science and math subjects as boys. But according to the report 'Generation STEM,' high school girls earn more math and science credits than boys do, and their GPAs, aggregated across math and science classes, are higher than boys'.

I think what's happening is that women are allowed to be funnier as we stop pretending that there are subjects that they shouldn't address.

To be feminist doesn't mean you can't be submissive.

I don't see myself playing the docile, submissive bahu on television!

When I signed 'Guide,' my colleagues in the industry said that I was doing a big mistake. They even said that this might be my last film because that was the phase when actresses in the industry were portrayed as submissive women. We used to do love stories or family dramas where women were ideal in every role.

We're coming into a new generation of women where there's the submissive woman, and then our reaction to it is, 'No, I'm a man, too, and I'm masculine,' and then we fight against it, which isn't the answer, either.

When you look at the roles I've done and the roles coming up, they're all strong. I guess I'm more drawn to that than that kind of submissive role females can be categorised as.

There's a certain way people are used to seeing nude women, and that's in a submissive, coy pose, not looking at the camera. And in this poster, I'm looking dead into the camera with no expression on my face. I think it freaks a lot of people out.

Really, I think the extra layer of raising a son as a gay black man comes from trying to raise a son who doesn't subscribe to masculine stereotypes.

Growing up, I wasn't allowed dolls, and my brothers weren't allowed guns. I inherited my brothers' clothes. I was never dressed in pink, and they were never dressed in blue; there were none of those rules that people still bizarrely subscribe to.

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