Quotes About Representation

We're not perfect, but we do have democracy.

As a black person in this country, I am always frustrated by the lack of attention my people's issues get. But at least the news and politicians are talking about not talking about our issues. Native issues are basically ignored.

I mean, putting women in the center of a movie and not talking about men, that's already political, right?

There aren't very many notable Native American female figures historically. That's the way that it's been. Pocahontas and Sacajawea.

Whether you like it or not, when you claim to be a Christian, the world takes note.

I felt that mainstream comedy caters to men and people don't even notice.

I have noticed when you get a bunch of dudes in a room together, and you just have one woman or two women, the dudes will bro out. And the woman won't get heard.

The characters I've played that people have noticed included a cross-dresser and a transsexual.

Have you noticed that they write parts for mute women but not for mute men? It must be a masculine dream: a woman who can feel and hear but not talk!

I noticed that, on 'Spooks,' there were a lot of women behind the camera and in different departments.

Every movement ignores disabled people. So, during MeToo no one was talking about the experience of disabled women; during BLM the notion of black disabled people was just ignored and so in terms of comparison we need to have this movement for disabled people.

It's a philosophy that - 'We, the People' - it's about us, that if the Americans want to do something, they have the power to try to put leaders in place to carry out whatever their notions are.

Some novelists want to give people in history a voice because they have been denied it in the past.

You know, everyone needs somebody to talk for them every now and then.

I was growing up and maturing at a time where we were invisible, man. We were nowhere except negative. Any time you saw a Latin person in Hollywood or on TV, they were some sort of negative character.

Nowhere in the world will you find a cowboy speaking in Tamil.

I think that if we really want to break it down, that non-black filmmakers have had many, many years and many, many opportunities to tell many, many stories about themselves, and black filmmakers have not had as many years, as many opportunities, as many films to explore the nuances of our reality.

All of the cultural nuances and the traumas and the complexities that come with being a third-culture kid, these are all nuances that the quote-unquote system of Hollywood is just starting to become privy to.

Now, if we look at the way in which the labor movement itself has evolved over the last couple of decades, we see increasing numbers of black people who are in the leadership of the labor movement and this is true today.

I've said numerous times how proud I am to be Scottish and how proud I have been to compete for Britain, too, and I don't think these two things necessarily have to be mutually exclusive.

When I started, it was all meter maids or the sassy nurse, or the sassy receptionist in the hospital. And I felt like: Are those the only jobs that large, black women have?

I tend to play nurses and waitresses and policewomen.

I used to object to being called an Indian writer, and would always say I was a writer who happened to be an Indian, and who happened to write about Indians.

I went to a technology conference in Germany, and there were these beautiful, model-like women standing there in front of the products. I asked a question, and she had no clue what the product was. She had to call someone from the back to explain it to me. To me, that's using a woman as an object. To me, that's totally wrong.