Quotes About Representation

Remember, MTV would only show white videos for a long time. Can you imagine that? That was the '80s when that happened. It's hard to even think of that now, you know?

I was never seen with one girl in a video, right? My videos always had many girls.

In the early '80s, it was hard to find celebrities you can identify with if you lived in the hood. There weren't any rap videos at the time.

It's really important to me to still spend time in the ends - I'm there all the time. I do my videos there, I still talk about it. It's important for me to be an inspiration to the youth of the area and not just leave now I've blown up.

The 'Down in the DM' to 'Rake It Up' to videos, the artwork... everything is 100 percent me. If you want to sample it, if it's going to be in a movie, whatever, you gotta call me.

I always prioritize dark-skinned women when I'm casting my music videos. I just believe that we deserve to be front and center. I never like to make the girls I choose look like backup.

With Vietnam, the Iraq War, so many American films about war are almost always from the American point of view. You almost never have a Middle Eastern character by name with a story.

It's because films like 'Selma' are so rarely made that we end up putting them under the microscope. One, maybe two, a year. As a white person, you don't have that. You have the gamut. No one says to Oliver Stone, 'Another film about Vietnam? White characters again?'

In the United States in the 20th century, every major event that America was going through, there was a boxer who seemed to symbolically represent it, from slavery to the Vietnam War to the Depression - all the way along, you just seemed to have boxers that carried the narrative.

In Hollywood, I was never restricted to just one Asian character. I've been cast as a Chinese, a Vietnamese, a Korean, a Japanese and a Cambodian.

To put it simply, as a black man, I started watching films at the age of six, and I've since seen the bad guys changing race - between the African savages, to the Native Americans, and then the blacks and the Arabs and the Chinese and the Vietnamese. Look at 'Rambo': it's exactly that.

The Vietnamese and the Republicans are, with an intensity, trying to take this seat from which we have done so much for our community - to take this seat and give it to this Van Tran, who is very anti-immigrant and very anti-Hispanic.

In a portrait, you have room to have a point of view. The image may not be literally what's going on, but it's representative.

Our flag is not just one of many political points of view. Rather, the flag is a symbol of our national unity.

Perhaps, despite my objections, the success of films like: 'The Help,' 'Django,' 'The Butler,' or '12 Years a Slave,' will further persuade Hollywood to widen its view and edit its erroneous perception of what a commercial black film can look like.

In a portrait, you have room to have a point of view and to be conceptual with a picture. The image may not be literally what's going on, but it's representative.

As a Third World citizen, I always feel that I need to express my point of view. Sometimes the points of view of Third World countries are never expressed. We don't have that possibility, sometimes, to spread what we feel and how we see things.

My view of myself doesn't change. I know who I am. I'm Cuban American; both my parents are Cuban - one was a little browner than the other one. That's who I am. I feel sorry that it's taken so long for the film industry to figure it out and to catch up.

The symbolic view of things is a consequence of long absorption in images. Is sign language the real language of Paradise?

I really hope that the traditional sort of girl that people view as an actress changes. There's room for everyone, you know? All of us bring different things to the table. It's nice to show people that you don't have to be one type of personality to do this.

In America, we have so many movies and so much media about the Islamic world, the sub-continental world, but it's not a conversation, it's a monologue. It's always from one point of view. 'If we don't tell our own stories, no one will tell them' is my mantra.

When you're doing a film and the majority of the film is cast black, for me, it's most important to get people to view those movies as just movies, as just good movies. At the end of the day, regardless of the color of the cast, we're all doing the same thing in this business: trying to make a good film.

On The Practice, I get to do what I love to do, and I am making a contribution that will, in the end, help raise social consciousness, dispel some of the myths about being large, and change the way that people view and interact with large people.

I'm just one person with one experience, so really on 'Question Time' and in my comedy day job I just say: 'Hello, I'm Rosie, I'm disabled, this is my view of the world.' If you agree with that, if you can take similarities with that, great, but I never assume that I'm grand enough to speak for a fifth of the country.