Quotes About Representation

You're wrong if you think young people don't deserve the vote.

I have a wide spectrum, a wide demographic. I have the young girls, I have the gay community, I have many regular theatergoers. I do feel a tremendous responsibility and pride to be a role model for some of these young people.

Young people are so often dissed by the media.

I think it's important that we have strong, female characters in movies now, which can really leave an impression on people - especially young people - and that they're not 'sexy' or 'cool.'

I realized how far-reaching the effect of hip hop was when I walked by a jewelry store named Bling in a small, rural town in France. Hip hop has made a huge impact on urban culture. Yet many brands still don't speak to young people in a tone and manner that's representative of them.

The emails and the tweets and the Facebook posts and the fan mail that we get from young people all over America that are on the football team or on the hockey team are so touching. They tell me, 'Hey, this is me. I still have to remain in the closet, but your role in '90210' makes me feel better the way being gay is being portrayed.'

I'm really excited about the revolution that is young people actually playing young people on Broadway.

Young people, all too often, find their interests overlooked and their voices ignored.

It seems to me that most things that are being made are designed for young people. There aren't that many depictions of melancholic older people, even though they form a growing proportion of the population.

It's hard as a young person of a different ethnicity or background to look at the TV and not see anyone who looks like you. Representation is very important.

Every young person needs to have a character that they can identify with and feel included by.

I think about a young person who is sitting at home, 13 or 14, a person of color, possibly questioning their sexuality, and watching Dr. Hugh Culber and saying, 'I'm a part of an ideal future that we could work towards.' We're planting seeds in the minds of young people to say, 'Your possibilities are limitless.'

Whenever I have a job, it's very important for me to handle myself in a way so that when there's another person, a young person of color, or even someone who's my age now, that they'll say, 'Oh, Dule was cool. Yeah, he handled his business. Yeah, he really added to what we did here,' so maybe we'll do it again.

I think when I was a young person, there was just kind of - there was very little dialogue about it. And there was just kind of one way to be gay, right? You saw very effeminate guys. You saw very butch women. And there was no kind of in-between. And there was no - you know, there wasn't anything in the media. There wasn't anything on television.

It's important, as a young person of color, to see yourself reflected in the media.

I want every young woman, just like I was a high school assembly intern, to realize that this is a place where they have a role. We need their voices. We need that diversity. We're getting there. We're making progress on more elected women.

As a young woman, I was disturbed by the fact that there was no imagery that truly expressed the experience of a young woman and the challenges and turbulence we go through. All we had were teenage magazines like 'Cosmopolitan,' which are very one-sided and show an objectified view of women.

I have to say, as a young woman of color, and this may sound controversial, in sci-fi, anything is possible. In sci-fi I can belong to the military. In sci-fi I can have an interracial love affair; I can be a revolutionary.

I'm really excited about this generation of young women that can look at a screen and see some brown people in space.

Women are not only deciding the outcome of elections, they serve as important role models for their daughters and other young women - they hold a key to expanding the way in which women value and experience politics.

I think it would be difficult to argue that I'm a net-negative for womankind. I've tried pretty hard to bring in unusual female voices and perspectives. Not just young women and not just white women, either. I don't know that I'm the best target for improvement. I don't know that I'm the problem.

It's wonderful that we're portraying women in this way so that young women can see that women actually are strong and capable of accomplishing all kinds of things.

I would love to keep playing roles where I get to inspire young women, and I get to uplift them and tell their stories and tell important stories that haven't been told.

It's double standards when you're young women. When we started out it was almost like, 'This is your lane, stay in your lane. You're the faces and the name.' We're not. We're the brand.