Quotes About Representation

Black people, if I may, we don't get a lot of opportunities to do a lot of different things outside the norm, outside of what is expected of us. Black women on Broadway are expected to put themselves downstage center and tear the roof off.

Representation is so important because it's hard for kids to want to be what they can't see. Little girls and boys need to know that it's natural for girls to love science and tech.

The big problem is that a lot of Americans, whether they are underrepresented minorities or from rural areas, do not know about career opportunities in the tech industry because they may not have had role models who are part of this field or learned about STEM in school.

While there should be collective efforts to increase tech inclusion overall, the industry must work to specifically attract and retain women of color.

When I was growing up, there was no one. There were very few black women in tech; there were very few black women in the fashion game. We didn't have our Grace Jones - Grace Jones was before my time. We didn't really have a lot of black women in electronic and punk who were celebrated in the same levels as, say, your big mega-superstars.

It's important to be an ally. You don't have to be a black woman to think we should have more black women in tech.

Sometimes I speak out on women in tech issues.

There isn't a King Lear for women, or a Henry V, or a Richard III. You reach a level where you can handle that stuff technically and mentally, and it's not there.

When I first started designing sportswear, I felt that women weren't represented in sports performance. I felt that men were dressed really well both technically and visually, and women were almost like an afterthought.

The state-of-the-art techniques really allowed us to make maps of how Sting's brain organizes music. That's important because at the heart of great musicianship is the ability to manipulate in one's mind rich representation of the desired soundscape.

The degree of intelligence that a man or a machine can show depends on many qualities of the ways that knowledge, goals, and problem-solving techniques are represented and put together, and not so much on the fine details.

Ted Cruz is not the official spokesman for American conservatism. If you want somebody who has been out there, who has offered an alternative - the person who offered an alternative, for example, is... Paul Ryan.

Parts for Asians are hard enough to get, and if Tee, which sounds kind of generically Asian, helps me get roles, so be it.

If you were an alien who came to our bookstores - or browsed our teen magazines - you'd think that only Earth girls who look like Mila Kunis ever got any action.

Honestly, I never thought I'd actually be playing a teen lesbian. I didn't think it was going to go this far. But I'm glad that it did, because there have been a lot of fans who have expressed that they've been going through similar situations in their lives.

My writing books with positive gay characters has come more out of anger than anything else: anger at not having been able to find honest, accurate books about people like myself as a teen, books that show we're as diverse as straight people and that we can lead happy, healthy, productive lives just as straight people can.

It's very important to see a black gay teen represented.

By the time I was a teen, I was an expert at scanning people's faces, always in search of eyes like mine. I devoured glossy magazines, ever mindful of the language we used to talk about beauty. The sections on how to apply makeup intrigued me most precisely because their audience never included me.

The movies I used to watch, I remember always being so angry because I felt like I, as a teenage girl, was never truly represented in a film. There were always bits of me that were represented - I'd watch 'Juno' and be like, 'Oh, well part of me is like that, but it's still not the whole thing.'

When I was young, there weren't any teenage girls I could relate to in film. They were all put in boxes: the virginal good girl, the really sarcastic asexual one. I wanted to do something that represented how I felt then.

Teenage girls in television and film, in my experience, oftentimes are portrayed as either the sweet, innocent virgin or the super-sexy, experienced, town bicycle. There never seems to be an in-between. I think most girls are somewhere in between those two tropes.

When I was a teenager, in the '80s, it was 'Dynasty.' It was 'Beverly Hills, 90210.' And those were fantasies. Those weren't reflective of my experience. And I think we all want that; we all want to see ourselves, our story told, something to relate to, to help us and know that we're not freaks, that our experiences aren't odd.

Let me speak for myself: I think I wanted to see people who looked like me on TV. I wanted to see people who had similar experiences as I had, growing up. There was nobody on television when I was a teenager who I could relate to.

It sounds so negative of me to say, but I don't feel like there were many coming-of-age films when I was growing up. I think that when I was a teenager, I felt really misrepresented in the teenage roles that I was watching onscreen. Especially in women.