Djimon Hounsou Quotes

The white explorers had been my heroes. The Aborigines, I thought they were real savages. That was what I'd been taught and that's what I believed.

It is all too easy to draw conclusions and make sweeping judgments about millions of Muslim women based on fleeting television images. That is not right.

We have to allow ourselves the freedom to make mistakes, including cultural mistakes, in our first drafts. I believe it's okay to get cultural details wrong in your first draft. It's okay if stereotypes emerge. It just means that your experience is limited, that you're human.

It appalls me that the people who decide what Americans will be watching on the tube have never been to the United States. Not the real United States.

America has this understanding of Africans that plays like National Geographic: a bunch of Negroes with loincloths running around the plain fields of Africa chasing gazelles.

I've never understood why artists, who so often condescend to the cliches of their own culture, are so eager to embrace the cliches of cultures they know nothing about.

Like most reasonable people, it saddens me when I see Americans celebrating a heritage they don't understand.

Whenever you talk about Chinese dragons, emperors, palaces, concubines - they conjure up a whole colonial argle-bargle that has nothing to do with historical reality.

In the common esteem, not only are the only good aboriginals dead ones, but all aboriginals are either sacred or contemptible according to the length of time they have been dead.

For a subject worked and reworked so often in novels, motion pictures, and television, American Indians remain probably the least understood and most misunderstood Americans of us all.

But here’s the thing: Appropriation occurs when a style leads to racist generalizations or stereotypes where it originated, but is deemed as high fashion, cool, or funny when the privileged take it for themselves. Appropriation occurs when the appropriator is not aware of the deep significance of the culture that they are partaking in.

If a foreign country doesn't look like a middle-class suburb of Dallas or Detroit, then obviously the natives must be dangerous as well as badly dressed.

I'm Italian. I wouldn't know how to play a Jew.

Our incapacity to comprehend other cultures stems from our insistence on measuring things in our own terms.

As a child, I was subjected to a lot of spaghetti Westerns and hated them. I wanted the Indians to win - or just not be so sad!

Australia has a thing where apparently it's fine for me to dress up as an Asian woman. No one has questioned that.

America is so accustomed to some depiction of native people that is entirely racist, and there's a perception that that is okay.

I often find myself unsatisfied with books 'about' Indians because they are written from the viewpoint of non-Indians.

I don't think anyone could write about another culture and get it 100 percent accurate.

Yeah, I'm sure there are stereotypes of Asian people.

You can't help but feel that the Chinese are a subspecies.

If, as a Spaniard, I am so often offended by the stereotypes that abound regarding my country, how can I accept and repeat the ones that fall even more heavily upon Israel?

Americans intentionally deride what people in the Old World hold sacred.

History, like beauty, depends largely on the beholder, so when you read that, for example, David Livingstone discovered the Victoria Falls, you might be forgiven for thinking that there was nobody around the Falls until Livingstone arrived on the scene

I navigate different cultures daily, and I understand how people can make false assumptions because of their lack of interaction with the cultures I find myself in. But if they don't frequent these spaces much, how can they rush to judgment?