Quotes About Diversity

For me, I've always wanted to portray roles that are empowering. Also, being empowering doesn't necessarily mean being strong all the time.

Movies and TV are America's No. 1 export. So if our No. 1 export is all male, all white, then there's only one point of view. And I just think it's really important that as Americans - I'm a new American, but I am an American - that we don't portray ourselves to the world so one-sided and exclusive.

As someone who is non-binary gender identifying, I feel a particular responsibility to portray members of my community on stage and on screen, not only as fully fleshed-out characters who are integral to the plot, but as characters whose gender identity is just one of many parts that make up the whole person.

I have been lucky enough to portray many, many characters.

It still baffles my brain that I actually get to portray a character on American television that's this gay, femme-y Filipino guy.

I am ready to portray any kind of role that includes negativity, if it is a challenging one.

It is a challenge to portray to women of different generations and their complexities and hopes and agonies as a woman.

As an actor, I am open to all possible characters that I can portray.

If you support diversity and think shows should give a portrayal of what America truly looks like, then performers with disabilities must be included in that equation...People have been very good at being politically correct.

My dad is Arab. I'm not Muslim, but half of family is, so I see a lot of injustice happening in the portrayal of Muslims that they don't have any heroes.

In Hollywood, there is one dominant voice. It is a white, male, straight gaze. When I talk about positive portrayals of black people and women, I'm saying complexity. I'm not saying goody-two-shoes, everything's okay. No. The positive view of me is to see me as I am: the 'good,' the 'bad,' the gray. That is a positive portrayal.

The characters I've portrayed may outwardly be quite different from one another, but I've found that they're also intrinsically linked.

Female physicists, astronomers and mathematicians are up against more than 2,000 years of convention that has long portrayed these fields as inherently male.

I feel like Africans are too often portrayed as people on the National Geographic channel: the image is of an African man in a loincloth chasing a gazelle. It's not intentionally racist; I wouldn't call it racist at all. It's a lack of understanding another culture.

Blacks on prime-time TV are only portrayed as comedians - and often in no better a light than 'Amos & Andy.'

I've portrayed so many diverse individuals on the screen that my own personality never emerged.

I am fine playing 'Law & Order' and even the 'Jurassic' movies to be straight up, as far as the characters being portrayed there, but I never want to stay in straight-up land too long. I always wanted to do something where the character's world gets to be explored.

I think lot of Muslims have gotten fatigued by the way Muslim characters, even 'positive' ones, are portrayed in the media.

Black and awkward is the worst, because black people are stereotyped as being anything but awkward in mainstream media... Black people are always portrayed to be cool or overly dramatic, anything but awkward.

Certainly, living in the U.S., as I have for over two decades, you see how Asians are portrayed in the media... I didn't see myself represented, you know, when I used to look at ads on TV.

I never want to make any characters one-dimensional, especially as women can often be portrayed as the dark one or the evil one.

If you see black people being portrayed in this one way well then, when you see a black person in real life, you're going to carry some of that way of thinking with you.

The best books I read as a child were set in far-flung places, but also portrayed characters experiencing a life far removed from my own.

The Muslim world is portrayed as a monolith that is consistently scary and negative, and as much as you can be an open-minded person, if the only diet of information you get is scary images of men in beards, that starts to play on you. But you come to find out that the Muslim world is not a monolith.