Quotes About Inclusion

Having seen TED from a distance, I always thought if ever there was a place for someone like me, the outcasts, people who maintained who they are despite being told what they were, it was TED.

Parts for Asians are hard enough to get, and if Tee, which sounds kind of generically Asian, helps me get roles, so be it.

Honestly, I never thought I'd actually be playing a teen lesbian. I didn't think it was going to go this far. But I'm glad that it did, because there have been a lot of fans who have expressed that they've been going through similar situations in their lives.

My writing books with positive gay characters has come more out of anger than anything else: anger at not having been able to find honest, accurate books about people like myself as a teen, books that show we're as diverse as straight people and that we can lead happy, healthy, productive lives just as straight people can.

It's very important to see a black gay teen represented.

By the time I was a teen, I was an expert at scanning people's faces, always in search of eyes like mine. I devoured glossy magazines, ever mindful of the language we used to talk about beauty. The sections on how to apply makeup intrigued me most precisely because their audience never included me.

What we wanted to do was tell a story that felt relatable to anyone who's been a teenager. We haven't all been a second-generation Pakistani-American girl with superpowers, but we've all been 16 and awkward.

My mum is black, my dad is white, and when I was a teenager, people would say, 'So what are you? Are you black? Or white? What are you more of?'

When I was a teenager, in the '80s, it was 'Dynasty.' It was 'Beverly Hills, 90210.' And those were fantasies. Those weren't reflective of my experience. And I think we all want that; we all want to see ourselves, our story told, something to relate to, to help us and know that we're not freaks, that our experiences aren't odd.

Let me speak for myself: I think I wanted to see people who looked like me on TV. I wanted to see people who had similar experiences as I had, growing up. There was nobody on television when I was a teenager who I could relate to.

I think every teenager feels like a Martian in something, whether it's in their family, I think, or in their school. I think every teenager, every human being has a sense that they don't belong somewhere.

The current concept of prom just seems so empty. Teenagers get dressed up to go to a dance at a fancy location. It encourages social inclusion or exclusion based on your ability or inability to snag a date.

Issues to do with disability, mental health and not being neurotypical often affect many genuine teenagers but are rarely reflected in the fiction they read.

In the 1980s, there weren't a lot of role models for gay teenagers.

I feel a lot of folks, like teenagers, can feel like outcasts.

The most moving responses I got to my coming out in the first place was people, like teenagers, letting me know that it made their lives easier in some way.

I identify very proudly as a disabled woman. I identify with the crip community. I didn't invent the word 'crip'. It's a political ideology I came to in my late teens and early 20s.

People want to be represented on television.

It's very hard, you know, for an Asian actor to be in a prime-time television series.

For so many people, television and movies may be the only way they understand people who aren't like them.

When I grew up, I never saw anyone looking like me on TV, you know? I'm so glad to see a lot more of us on television, whether it's Mindy Kaling or it's Irrfan Khan or Freida Pinto. You know, I hope, like, little girls across the world can just look at me and say, 'Ah, I want to be that!' Indian or not, it shouldn't matter.

Growing up, there was this explosion of B television. 'Fresh Prince of Bel Air,' you have 'Family Matters,' 'A Different World.' I had examples - of black children, black families, black women, black men - that represented who I was.

The world in which we live is diverse, and I think television and film should reflect that.

I'm extremely proud I'm an Asian female and I'm on television, because there aren't many of us.