Vanessa Diffenbaugh Quotes

This first-generation narrative keeps happening over and over and over again, whether it was Irish or Jewish or our community, South Asians, Japanese-Americans, Mexican-Americans. We've all gone through this sort of bridge, and it will continue to happen.

I've been to so many parties in England and in America that's exactly like that, where you're kind of, like, seen as Other. When you're just living your life, and you have to adopt the Other in order to understand and navigate the society.

To be an Indian in modern American society is in a very real sense to be unreal and ahistorical.

We Greeks are the blacks of Europe.

As writers, we don't just need to write about poverty or war or the immigrant experience.

Every social injustice is not only cruel, but it is economic waste.

There is a segment of the American population that has been excluded from the national myth, and that should be redressed.

We have to improve life, not just for those who have the most skills and those who know how to manipulate the system. But also for and with those who often have so much to give but never get the opportunity.

In Trinidad, where as new arrivals we were a disadvantaged community, that excluding idea was a kind of protection; it enabled us - for the time being, and only for the time being - to live in our own way and according to our own rules, to live in our own fading India.

I'm fascinated by how ethnic communities have assimilated into massive capitalist environments.

I've always been interested in the idea of people who fell through the cracks.

Minorities…are almost always in the right.

By virtue of their being regarded as something "exceptional," even by friends and well-wishers, Negroes of attainment and genius have been unfairly disassociated from the group, and group credit lost accordingly.

My whole family has been having trouble with immigrants ever since we came to this country.

The only thing that separates women of color from everyone else is opportunity.

Increasingly I feel like a Jew, an immigrant, a Russian - anything but a normal, mainstream American.

As an immigrant, I learned by watching other people.

The great white advantage has been living inside history, adapting to its constant demands, nurturing the values and the habits of life that allow one to keep pace. This is the cultural capital that whites too often take for granted and rarely think of insisting on in the former victims of exclusion.

When folks say 'identity politics' don't matter, it simply reinforces the norm of a white, middle-class, cis narrative and further marginalizes the rest of us who don't share that identity.

What we were all always saying with 'The Wire' was that there's a whole group of people that America just sort of wants to throw away. They want to forget about them, and if they could, they'd get rid of them. They are Americans - they're worth saving; they're worth helping.

I was an immigrant when I came, and one of my biggest things was I really wanted to fit in. I didn't want to be, 'Oh, look at that guy;' I wanted to be part of the crowd. Which is a weird thing, because the more successful I got, the more out of the crowd I became.

For immigrant families, television is what connects you to American culture, but it's also what makes you feel like an outsider.

It is in nobody's interest that groups should find themselves excluded from society.

I'm excited to share my experience as an immigrant assimilating to a new country and an outsider stumbling my way into Hollywood.

If too many people feel excluded from the system and cannot access its benefits, they will ultimately rebel against it.