Quotes About Prejudice

I was always playing very stupid people, or the fat mate of the main girl.

I have a problem with people saying feminine means anti-feminist, and I think it's counter-productive to immediately associate anything 'girly' with vanity or stupidity.

Codes and signals are as important as explicit messages, and the two are linked. The bore pressing someone to tell them 'where they're really from' will see themselves as different to the aggressive stranger barking at someone to 'get back to their own country,' but the subconscious, if not explicit, message is the same.

You will readily believe me when I say that on leaving my country, I little imagined that I should ever become a Baptist. I had not indeed candidly examined the subject of baptism, but I had strong prejudices against the sect, that is everywhere spoken against.

We all have cultural bias, racial bias. One of the difficult things around this subject matter is to deny that we have places we go to subconsciously, and unless you consciously decide that that's wrong and you've got to do something about it, especially if you're in a position of power, it won't change.

Expectations that black directors have to make black films about black subject matter are, to me, kind of absurd.

My straight friends accept I'm gay but they forget that some people don't. Even now, if I go into a party, people don't usually assume I'm gay, so you have to keep coming out. And if you say you've got a film with a gay subject matter, you can sometimes see people's eyes going, 'Oh! OK!'

I think what's happening is that women are allowed to be funnier as we stop pretending that there are subjects that they shouldn't address.

There's nothing wrong with being help. But it's very wrong that we presume people of colour are in a subservient position. That's problematic.

People think I don't have substance and I'm just another pretty face.

Someone told me that they didn't want to take a flu shot because they didn't want to put a foreign substance in their body. What do they think they do at dinner every night?

People tend to call me for only one thing - NRI-based roles. I'd like to change that and expand a little bit, and have more substance.

In London we give ourselves a pat on the back, rightly, for not killing one another, for our prejudice being subtle rather than lethal.

I think that racism has gotten more subtle, and it's not even racism anymore: it's placism. Like where you live or whether you went to community college or Harvard, and it exists within the race.

When a black man is stopped by a cop for no apparent reason, that is covert racism. When a black woman shops in a fancy store and is followed by security guards, that is covert racism. It is more subtle than 1960s racism, but it is still racism.

My kids speak of both subtle slights and blatant racism. It's a narrative I never imagined for them.

Homophobia obviously still exists, but it is a lot more subtle, and it is a lot more in the background.

I grew up in Nashville in a white suburb. We lived next to a Klan member. We didn't see hoods, but my dad knew that guy was a Grand Dragon.

You've never seen a Columbine done by a black child. Never. They always say, 'We can't believe it happened here. We can't believe it's these suburban white kids.' It's only them!

If you from Philly, you ain't a Villanova guy. Villanova is the suburbs. That's all you know about Villanova.

My dad worked two jobs and moved us to the suburbs, and just being a black person, I went through a lot of racism and being called names and being bullied every single day. And it was hard. I didn't have any friends.

Being a drag queen out on the subway or out on the street is still not the most safe thing you can be doing.

I would never know how good I was if I didn't have Bob Arum. Bob Arum is white, Jewish; He was working for prosecutor's office. I'm black, an ex-convict, ex-number runner. Who would be most likely to succeed? It would be Bob 100-1. Yet I beat Bob on everything we ever done, with love.

That is still the case in this country for too many students, the soft bigotry of low expectations. If you don't expect them to learn, if you don't expect them to succeed - then it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy.