Quotes About Prejudice

I get told I have a 'period' face quite often. Maybe it's the pale skin but I get a lot of pre-Forties posh roles.

What 'Hundred' has done for me, it has open up avenues where people find more things about me, other than my body or the way I look because coming from TV background, there is anyway a little less perspective given to the kind of talent we possess.

I really hate racism because I saw people denied possibilities.

I don't believe it's humanly possible to be free of bias.

I was told that if I wanted to be a leading man in Hollywood, I couldn't possibly be thought of as gay.

You know the way it is: sometimes Americans think of us as their backward little cousin. It's the whole shamrock, potatoes, famine, leprechaun thing, all that drunken paddies rubbish.

I've experienced colorism in that way: where if you're lighter, then you'll potentially be accepted into society better than if you were darker-skinned.

You know that I had heard so many times people say things like, 'You could never write 'Harry Potter' and have it be about Harriett Potter because nobody would read it; people only want to read an adventure story if it's about a boy,' and I thought, 'I don't think that's true.'

I think people assume that because I talk the way that I talk that I grew up with money, and then I've had to say, 'No, I grew up poor.' And then I was like, 'Why do I have to play this game where the only black experience that's authentic is the one where you grew up in poverty?' I mean, it's ridiculous.

As a mother living in poverty, I don't expect my parenting choices to be respected by default.

There's an assumption if you have any faith you vote this way, you vote that way, or you're this, or you're absolutely a conservative, and those just aren't all true.

I saw the things that my sister went through - she's dark skinned - with boys not considering her attractive in her youth and the pain that it caused her.

Self-doubt is a constant companion for a chubby, gay, black boy born in the South.

Being someone with Latin roots, so many doors are constantly closed for you because people put you in a category, and the thing I've always wanted to avoid is categorisation.

People don't think I can construct a sentence, let alone write a script.

I wish Americans understood that race is a social construct, even if we don't want it to be.

I think that, in America, even though race is a social construct, I mean, we say this in theory, but I think a lot of people don't believe that it really is. And so it's still a very racialized society.

Contrary to assumptions in the law, white America is hardly a monolith.

Even if you have something that you can contribute to society, very often society doesn't view you that way. Because when you are The Other, the first response by the mainstream, if you will, is to ostracize.

The conventional wisdom is that if you are gay, you cannot play the romantic straight lead in a movie.

I never set out to convert anyone in the Klan. I just set out to get an answer to my question: 'How can you hate me when you don't even know me.'

I went to an all-boys school, where I played rugby, so ballet wasn't the coolest thing to do.

Every cop isn't a bad cop just like every NFL player that makes a mistake, we're not all bad guys.

In the middle of the night, when you're ambiguously ethnic, like me, when you're brown, beige, mauve, siena, one of those lighter browns in the Crayola box. You have to be careful of the cops and robbers, because nobody's quite sure what you are, but everybody has assumptions.