Shiva Ayyadurai Quotes

People would write me hate letters. How dare I try to represent Hispanics when I was so white? I tried to make them see it was racism.

Did people think I sounded black? Totally, but that was a marketing tool as well, but also this is how I grew up and these are my influences.

They just think I'm a white dude. Every once in a while someone thinks I'm Jewish. I get a lot of stuff, but never Latino.

Hockey is a sport for white men. Basketball is a sport for black men. Golf is a sport for white men dressed like black pimps.

As a British Muslim, I am no stranger to prejudice. I know what it's like to be discriminated against just because of your background or religion.

We live in a society that wants to label you with a color, sexuality, religion, or ethnicity. It divides us, but it also allows us to find pride in our identity.

I always put people with my kind of background first.

There were guys from different parts of the country, and absolutely I heard, 'Why are you playing football?' You just didn't see a Gonzalez out there or any kind of Latin name.

The ingrained image of black men being searched by the police feeds into the collective illusion that black men everywhere need to be policed more than others.

My heritage is a huge part of everything I do; it is, after all, part of what has made me who I am.

This is true across every single society; we project grossness onto a racial or gender subgroup or caste. A big part of social subordination and discrimination is to ascribe hyper-animality to other groups and use that as an excuse for subordinating them further.

There are so many people out there struggling with racism, or their sexuality or where they're brought up or how wealthy their family was ans these issues are not hidden, they were in the late 19 century and they're still important today.

I was teased about Indian food and the colour of my skin and why my knees and elbows were dark.

Until black culture as a whole is effectively disentangled from the python-grip of hip-hop, and by extension the street, we are not going to see any real progress.

In martial arts, for every attack, there is a counter you can throw. Somebody traps you, you can throw a hook. But there is no counter for bias.

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

I feel disheartened when I see stereotypes, because it's untrue and unfair. It just raises the level of inequality.

While television can help normalize the lives of marginalized people, it also can exploit their hardships and reinforce stereotypes, reducing their lives to mere entertainment.

Casting directors will often say that they are open to any ethnicity, but they're not.

I'm Colombian. My family all have different complexions; some are people of color. I've been called every name by white people, been mocked for speaking in Spanish by white people.

The routines of any ethnic comic - Eddie Murphy or George Lopez, for example - would not work if they were performed by anybody outside the group. The same routines would become arrogant and racist.

Racism is a perceptive error, and what you actually have to do is you have to get into spaces where you're meeting people and perceiving them as human beings and not as racial stereotypes and myths.

'An Octoroon' was written over about three years but premiered in 2014. I'm writing about America's relationship to its own history. Race or not, it's a story about suppression and oppression and many populations being devalued systematically.

This business of demonizing or pre-defining people by the way they look, the religion that they practice, or where they came from is not only un-American but it's going to hurt America.

Of course, I have been influenced by my Punjabi and Hariyanvi roots.