Quotes About Prejudice

There's an assumption that my audience is all these bearded twats from Dalston. But actually, quite a lot of older people go. For them, it's like pre-alternative comedy, when there was Dave Allen or Jackie Mason or someone. Also, weirdly, because I don't really swear, they're not scared off.

I swear, if anyone near me even so much as whispers the sentence 'Women probably don't want to direct,' my fist will fly as a reflex action.

Go to the depot here, now, and what will you see? A well-dressed colored lady, with her little children by her side, whom she has brought up intelligently and with refinement, as much so as white children, comes to the cars, and where is she shown to? Into the smoking car, where men are cursing, swearing, spitting on the floor.

You can get racially abused 10 times before you even reach the football stadium. If you've been confronted every day with something like that, it's hard. This is not about people playing the 'race card.' This is a reality that people like to sweep under the carpet.

'Mulk' is a film that needed to be made. We can no longer sweep the isolation of the Indian Muslim under the carpet.

I thought I was too intellectual to read something like 'Sweet Savage Love.'

All my black friends can't swim. Is that bad?

In the spirit of debunking racial stereotypes, the one that black people don't like to swim, I'm going to tell you how much I love to swim. I love to swim so much that as an adult, I swim with a coach.

Sure, I've felt racism. I think everybody has prejudice. When I was growing up, the dark Mexican kids weren't allowed in the public swimming pool in Dallas. My light-skinned friend got in, and he laughed at us. It didn't seem like a big deal, because we didn't know any different. So I never ran into anything that actually scarred me.

I did 'Kidulthood' and 'Adulthood,' and that's what people wanted and expect me to always do. They want me to do 'hood films and be the guy swinging baseball bats and saying 'Yo Blood' and beating up others in the street.

I never used to be taken seriously as a Swiss person.

Swiss guys are always exactly on time, but Albanians are not like this.

Maybe Asians are switching from studying to sports.

For years I didn't really fancy America. I hated it when I first went to LA, it's like a dirty Sydney. But having a job helped.

Everywhere in TV and films, actors who become mothers are treated differently. Suddenly, people will be like, 'Oh, she's a mom, so she can't play a sex symbol role.'

I find the English flag - the cross - quite frightening; it has very bad symbolism for me. Not just football hooligans but supremacists and the BNP.

Britain First, the English Defence League, the British National Party, and the National Front are all guilty of using British symbols and institutions (notably support for the Armed Forces) to attempt to further their own deeply objectionable beliefs.

It's not very interesting to establish sympathy for people who, on the surface, are instantly sympathetic. I guess I'm always attracted to people who, if their lives were headlines in a newspaper, you might not be very sympathetic about them.

Racism has always existed, and a big part of it is people just not knowing others. I think humans change other human's minds, and it's hard for someone in the middle of America to hate Syrian refugees if they've been able to befriend them.

There is a systematic effort to destroy every black male entertainer's image. They want us all to have an asterisk by our name.

Racism may be as systemic as it always was. It is the great problem of America. It's the one stumbling block that I don't believe was ever smoothed over.

I condemn racism on all levels, whether personal or systemic.

The reality is we have allowed systemic racism to continue through all these years.

Systemic racism is a problem from every aspect of life.