Ramy Youssef Quotes

I don't think there's enough breadth to the stories told about African-Americans.

I got sort of sick of seeing Asians being the blank, bland real estate agent or something. I didn't care. It didn't mean anything to me.

I think people, especially in the Muslim community, are rightly cautious any time you hear, 'Oh, there's going to be a Muslim character.'

Poitier opened the doors to so many artists, not just black artists. There is a line that goes from black to Latin to Asian with regards to roles.

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.'

Early on, I played a Chinese delivery person, and even that, which was very innocuous, felt like I was somehow betraying myself. I felt very self-conscious on set doing that role, with a crew that was almost entirely white.

There were so few examples of Asian or Asian-American lead characters on American TV or even in the movies. And the ones that have existed for so long were either stereotypical or offensive in some way, or just not reflective of the lives of people in the community.

In reality, black women, women of color, are powerful, bold, dynamic, and self-assured, so there's no reason their TV counterparts shouldn't be as such.

Just because we finally have a Latino family on TV doesn't mean we're up there to lecture people about what it means to be Latino.

It's important for a young black kid to see a Mexican hero, just to know that we're all equal.

I am not a Somali representative. I am not a Muslim representative. I am not a millennial representative. I am not a woman representative. I am a representative who happens to have all of these marginalized identities and can understand the intersectionality of all of them in a very unique way.

Immigrant characters now are getting much more well-rounded, and they have personalities, which is important because we do need to portray immigrants in a humanizing way.

Usually when you're Asian and you're on set, you're the only Asian there. Either you're the token Asian or you're the Asian sidekick.

Being a black lesbian myself, I roll my eyes a little bit when I see black lesbian characters on shows where it's purely there for decoration. You can just hear it in the writers room... 'What if we make her a lesbian?'

I really truly respect and honor the fact that the majority of my district is African-American and that I have to make sure that I surround myself with people with that lens.

If you were to turn on the TV in 1986, '87, you wouldn't see anybody having, I guess, a low-to-middle-income person of color experience. And you definitely wouldn't have a young LGBT person or their story told. The experience of being invisible in our culture has ramifications that I don't think any of us can really understand.

You just never see people of different ethnicities in period dramas.

We talk a lot about our identities, and we talk a lot about working to clear misconceptions about those identities. But it'd be really cool to see someone like myself not even have to talk about being Muslim or Egyptian, because it's just understood. We can all just be weird and not have to explain everything.

I spent 12 years of my life writing stories without black people. That's insane to me. It's insane that I could have believed in magical portals and dragons and all that stuff, but to believe a black person could be experiencing those things was unimaginable.

All we want eventually to see is more black and ethnic coaches involved at the higher levels of the game. Anything that promotes that is something very much worthwhile.

I don't wanna be like somebody that just depicts black characters where drugs and guns are just a majority of what they have to do.

There's diversity in nature, so why not the media?

It's interesting because diversity doesn't just happen by garnishing your omelet with a little bit of parsley. Diversity happens because the people that are telling the stories - the writers, directors, storytellers - want to tell their story.

When I was a little kid, I don't remember looking up and seeing so many Hispanic athletes out there.

It's very hard, you know, for an Asian actor to be in a prime-time television series.