Quotes About Stereotyping

I don't know what it is about me that gets cast in specific roles. Some people would say, 'You're just a pretty face,' but on 'Battlestar,' I'm not looking pretty every day. I'm pretty banged up.

I wanted to quit the industry when I was eighteen and finish '70s', finish my contract on the show and go to college because I was pretty convinced that after '70s' and after being on a show for eight years that I would be very much pigeonholed for something specific that I didn't want to be a part of anymore.

I am more than just a label. Why are people so driven to labeling where we fall on the sexual spectrum?

I know nothing more annoying when people I don't know jump to conclusions on my person based on nothing but gossip or speculation.

Because of my language and the pantomime with which most Europeans accompany their speech, I was catalogued as a heavy.

People who don't know me have opinions about me. That's the part that's very hurtful. Because how do you form an opinion about somebody if you've never met them or spent any time with them? So it's all based upon hearsay or things that they've read.

In countries where there are no racial differences or no religious differences, people find other reasons to set aside one certain group of people and generally spit in their direction.

By the time I was on TV, I was 19, but I played a kid, and they treated us like kids, so it's almost like I was a kid actor. Basically we were considered props who spoke.

Nothing in the world is easier in the United States than to accuse a black man of crime.

In the past, men created witches: now they create mental patients.

The entire race is usually judged by the actions of one man or woman

Because I'm a young black man driving a really nice, expensive car, I sometimes get harassed when I'm rolling through a ghetto neighborhood.

It's time for him to get over into the right lanes where the retards and the bimbo boxes poke along, random, indecisive, looking at each passing franchise's driveway like they don't know if it's a promise or a threat.

Oh come on, you did it yourself when you saw the billboard at the airport. 'Ugh! Blue hair! How tasteless!' When you did that, you identified, you categorized that character as belonging to the Other. And once you have done that, attacking it, murdering it, becomes easier. Perhaps even an urgent need.

The moment when someone attaches you to a philosophy or a movement, then they assign all the baggage and all the rest of the philosophy that goes with it to you. And when you want to have a conversation, they will assert that they already know everything important there is to know about you because of that association. And that's not the way to have a conversation.

If a woman has been married three years or more, you come to learn that she's usually easier to sleep with than a single woman.

I didn't want to be a hero and get into the mould but the film industry doesn't work like that. It has a habit of branding you in a specific image to market you easily.

I just played one of the bad guys in Hercules 3D, and I had cornrows. People moved away from me in elevators, that's for sure. I wore them for about three months. After a while, they get a little gnarly, and you have to redo them.

Americans have almost been conditioned to believe that the majority of people who seek to do us harm are those of Muslim descent.

What I hope to do in the States is to break up this stereotyping of Muslims and Arabs. I mean, we are basically the only sub-culture that is not represented in Hollywood. And it's funny because everybody is talking about the Muslim world and the Arab world, and we are not represented.

I've been typed as historical fiction, historical women's fiction, historical mystery, historical chick lit, historical romance - all for the same book.

I think you can tell a great deal from a name. For me, there are certain names that I hear, and I think, 'Urgh.' For me, a name is a shortcut of finding out what class that child comes from and makes me ask, 'Do I want my children to play with them?'

If someone plays five good games in a row for the Bavarians, there is more talk about them being in the national team than of those who play five good games in a row for Dortmund or Wolfsburg or Bayer Leverkusen.

For years we were called niggers to indicate we had no value or worth and that anything could be done to us,' Ray said. 'Then the word nigger became politically incorrect. Sio they began to calling us criminals. When you say a person is a criminal it means that what happens to them does not matter. It means he or she is a nigger. It means they deserve what they get.' - Melvin Ray