Mick Jagger Quotes

In a lot of films, they're showing more complete, developed characters of diverse ethnic backgrounds. The larger concern is to be able to tastefully explore the stereotypes, and still move past them to see the core of people.

I'm not against White writers writing about Blacks as long as they are as objective as say James McPherson writing about an Irish American janitor in his brilliant short story "Gold Coast."

It's always good to be around people who get it and understand because it's a huge difference working on a black set. I can walk on a black set and not have to worry about my hair because they know.

I take the responsibility of playing another ethnicity very, very seriously, and I promise myself and those people that I will represent them with as much dignity and integrity as I can muster.

Making a pretty picture, an image, is a completely different thing from acting to camera.

I do fairly represent Middle Eastern women.

I can honestly say I've never thought for a second about whether a character reflects poorly on any group. All that matters to me is that the character is true to my belief in who he or she is.

The truth of the matter is, I'm a filmmaker.

I sense a kind of fear of writing black or Asian characters from non-ethnic writers, who perhaps feel that they don't know the culture and therefore can't write about it. By and large, if there's an Asian character, I might get a call. But if the character is called 'Philip,' the chances are I won't.

I hope that doing truthful portrayals of people in a variety of circumstances gives people a kind of subterranean link to those characters.

Researching real people and doing them, I think, is harder than anything else. You don't want to do a caricature of them and you don't want to do an impression. You just want to do the best you can, in terms of presenting their views and a general impression of the guy. That's the hardest thing to do, real people.

I write for the people I grew up with. I took extreme pains for my book to not be a native informant. Not: 'This is Dominican food. This is a Spanish word.' I trust my readers, even non-Spanish ones.

There's drama in everything. That's why I love movies. Like 'Welcome to the Dollhouse.' I'm a 350-pound black man, and I could understand what it was like to be a little white girl.

There are so few representations of women that look remotely real in scripted television.

A filmmaker doesn't have to suffer to show suffering. You just have to understand it. You don't have to die to shoot a death scene.

My entire career, in fiction or nonfiction, I have reported and written about people who are not like me.

I certainly would never presume to play another race of a person. Diversity is important in Hollywood, and I would never want to feel like I was playing a character that was offensive.

Whenever you have a character in which one of his defining qualities is his sexuality, it's always challenging, because you don't want to bring in someone who's going to play that in a phony way.

It's not enough to be diverse in your casting. You have to service those characters; you have to make them fully well rounded because people are watching.

We are in a diversity age. I talk about the lack of diversity for black Americans, but what about the Asian Americans? You don't see them very often. They have a show called 'Fresh off the Boat.' No one is talking about that show. I saw it, and I found that show completely offensive, but I'm not Asian American.

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.

My naivety is to assume people will think there's compassion and solidarity in wanting to play someone even though we are not them.

I am a woman, I am a minority person, and I speak in a very plain way. And I think that reaches people.

Because when you have all white men in the writers' room trying to tell the perspective of cultural appropriation or what it's like to be black or Asian in America and not necessarily knowing what it's like, that's when everything gets mixed up.

Children of color need a mirror to see themselves in. And then people who don't have that experience, they need a window. They need a really personalized way to see what people who are different from them are going through.