Sanaa Lathan Quotes

Point-blank, there is not enough diversity in media.

I grew up in musicals, and if you looked like me and sounded like me, you were the character; you were never at the center of the story.

I think the biggest thing is voice. Whose voice is it? Who gets to control the narrative?

Telling diverse stories is at the heart of our culture.

No matter what happens, we couldn't let people say Asian-American actors can't act.

Not only do I not want to be stereotyped as this Asian girl who fights - gee, what a wonder - but also I have more to offer than that.

I believe black characters in fiction are still revolutionary, given our long history of erasure.

My work has always been controversial within certain segments of the Asian-American community. This is a community that is generally not represented well at all on the stage, in the media, etc. So on those few occasions when something comes along, everybody feels obligated to make sure that it represents his own point of view.

I was too Jewish for 'Flashdance.'

African-Americans are always forced to learn the other culture, but the other culture is not forced to learn ours. I went to acting school at Juilliard, and we learned Shakespeare and Shaw, but we never did the work of a single African-American playwright, not August Wilson or Ntozake Shange or Imir Baraka.

There is a certain danger in thinking about diversity in its own little box, as something that is somehow separate from 'normal' comic books and comics creators.

Why is the world that I see around me mixed, and why is the world I see in movies filled with all white people? Why does it have to be like that?

It's not enough even to have one black Barbie... because black women are not a monolith.

I grew up watching cinema in my country that wasn't telling stories about us, and we had to find a way to connect, and our references, our role models had nothing to do with us. And I'm so glad that it's changing.

Readers are hungry to have their stories in the world, to see mirrors of themselves if the stories are about people like them, and to have windows if the stories are about people who have been historically absent in literature.

As a woman of color, slowly and with some coercing, the not-for-profit theaters around the country are beginning to recognize and embrace the power of our stories, but with regards to Broadway and other commercial venues, we remain very much marginalized and excluded from that larger creative conversation.

You cannot collectively, as a society, decide that you are only going to represent one part of a minority. It's like saying you've represented black people on television because you aired an episode of the 'Cosbys.'

Our culture today that we live in is getting so diverse, yet in Hollywood, there's not a lot of diversity.

It's important to tell the story you're telling in the right way, which might involve black people or people of whatever heritage or ethnicity - or it might not.

In Hollywood, there is one dominant voice. It is a white, male, straight gaze. When I talk about positive portrayals of black people and women, I'm saying complexity. I'm not saying goody-two-shoes, everything's okay. No. The positive view of me is to see me as I am: the 'good,' the 'bad,' the gray. That is a positive portrayal.

The way Hollywood and TV is, black people don't have any choice but to see ourselves in white-dominated television shows and stories and movies.

I want to see designers capitalize on a beauty that is not only white. I need them to stop acting like beautiful black and brown women do not exist.

I wrote 'Redefining Realness' because not enough of our stories are being told, and I believe we need stories that reflect us so we don't feel so isolated in our apparent 'difference.'

All the excuses that people in power used to make for not telling diverse stories or including diverse people, they've proven to be false.

The biggest pop star in the world shouldn't be a boring white kid from Canada - the biggest pop star in the world should be a creative black kid from Texas that doesn't know how to come out to his family - that's a way more interesting story, and it gives a new type of kid some hope.