Quotes About Representation

Here, sir, the people govern; here they act by their immediate representatives.

When I started, there were no Indians on television or films, except for Sir Ben Kingsley. I was an actor in high school, college, and I played leads. And when I graduated, I knew that I couldn't go to Hollywood and audition for shows or films. I could try, but where was the evidence that it was going to happen?

One thing that always frustrated me was that, while Benjamin Franklin's was the best-known face of the eighteenth century, no one ever took his sister's likeness.

In 'A Few Best Men,' I play a lesbian character. I played the lesbian sister of the bride who ends up kissing a dude at the end, but she was, like, a full-on lesbian in that. And I beat out famous Australian lesbians for the role.

I just feel like, for whatever reason, female playwrights don't really ask me to do their plays. Nothing would make me happier than finding the sisterhood, but I can't make them.

My demographic is very broad. Once they come, they had an idea about jazz, and then they hear me, and they come back with sisters, brothers, and kids. My audience looks like America to me.

To sit for one's portrait is like being present at one's own creation.

I think the sitcom is the format for television. It's the essential form, and it represents more of the canon of TV, which is why I latched onto it.

I'd love to see a sitcom about someone with cerebral palsy.

Having L.G.B.T. people sitting in the room while decisions are being made, and sitting there as peers, will shift the conversation.

I just cut songs I love and that represent what I want to say. And if it crosses over, that's very flattering. It's cool to know that with people listening to rock and rap, I'm sitting on their iPods along with that stuff.

Congress wasn't built for members like me. For those of us who have young children, which is a minority, there's definitely the built-in assumption of a two-parent model... There is no template for how to do this in my situation as a single mom.

I've grown up with girls that are like Precious. I've grown up with people that are like everyone that I read about in that book. And so years later, when I was given the role, I just felt a huge responsibility to show the reality of that situation and to show that we're not making it up.

I'll make a general comment about this whole dependence on 'celebrities.' I object to this situation as it is right now, where they have inadvertently or manipulatively become the spokespeople for the African continent.

Do I want more women elected to Parliament? Absolutely. I devote significant amounts of time to getting more women in that situation.

For me, whenever I would see a lot of 'black films,' I didn't feel represented in it. I didn't feel connected to the characters or the situations or the humor.

Sex in the City was a different kind of phenomenon because of the show itself is a phenomenon and to me that's successful because to resonate with women across the board for six years and have only one African-American actor pass through for one episode.

When I was sixteen, I borrowed a copy of 'To Kill a Mockingbird' from the mobile library. Democrats and Republicans were standing for very different principles, and I could see which side was going to represent me.

My job is to make the case that I'll do the best job possible representing the people of Georgia's Sixth District, and what they want is representation that's focused on them and not this national partisan political circus.

The Sixth Sense is not a good white film. Insomnia is not a good white film. They're just good films. So why we can't we have good films that happen to have black people, or Asian, or Latino, or any other minority group in them?

Although the civil-rights movement did a lot to change how black life was dramatized on the American stage in the fifties and sixties, white composers and lyricists often still rely on familiar tropes when it comes to representing black women in musicals.

To me, beauty is inclusion - every size, every color - that's the world I live in.

Being the person I am, you know, the size I am, being a woman, being a black woman, there's not a lot of roles for us.

It's not a question of size, of whether it's a small or a big thing, but of what it has the power to incarnate.