Aja Brown Quotes

Dealing with boys at work and being the only girl can be challenging. I have my insecurities, but I've learned I have to be a good sport. I have to be able to take certain jokes and not take them personally. There are jokes made almost every second of the day. I had to develop a tough hide. You know, the music industry is dominated by guys.

I am a candidate for the Presidency of the United States. I make that statement proudly in the full knowledge that, as a Black person and as a female person, I do not have a chance of actually gaining that office in this election year.

To be white and male is not to be sexist and racist.

When you have a white male making the arguments, they carry more weight... Should they carry more weight? Absolutely not. But do they? Yes.

I think as soon as you're a woman, or any minority doing something, you automatically become a representative for it, and I think a lot of brilliant women's interviews are being wasted on talking about what it's like being a woman.

It's hard for men sometimes to talk about feminism, just as it's hard for people who aren't from ethnic minorities to talk about racial prejudice. It's a difficult conversation to have, but that doesn't mean we shouldn't have it.

I want white men to look around in their office and say, 'Oh, look, there's a lot of white men here. Let's change this.'

I talked to Katherine Johnson, and I tried to make it weighty by asking things like, "How as a Black woman did you do your work in NASA? They were misogynistic, and I'm sure you got called the n-word." She was just like, "Well, that was the way it was. I just did my job. I wanted to do my job." She was just so humble.

I walked into an international economics tutorial, and the professor said, 'I don't know how to teach a woman.' I said, 'It's the same as teaching a man.' I just sat down, and he had no choice but to start teaching. When I handed in my first paper, I think that shut him up.

Sexism is deeply rooted in our history and society that waking up and stepping outside of it is like I'm watching 'Night of the Living Dead Part Two' all day, every day.

When I was growing up, I was told you could be anything you want to be, but I didn't really believe that because you couldn't be president. Like, I knew that; we never had a black president.

When you're the only woman of color, and you walk into a room of people who don't look like you, most of them with blond hair and blue eyes, it's disheartening. The weirdest part is that I walk in and assume they think I'm auditioning to play a different role than them, but I'm going out for their same role.

There are positive steps being taken to tackle issues that people from all walks of life, races, ethnicities, and political persuasions agree have been devastating to communities of color.

As a stunt woman, I took it upon myself to be a bit of a jock about it. So you wouldn't see me vulnerable, you wouldn't see me hurting or sad because I was there as a professional to do my job. Nobody likes to see a girl get hurt - that's the truth of it - so I had to put them at ease so they would let me do my job.

I've been working almost 20 years, and I think I've worked with maybe one black director of photography in that time. Maybe two women directors or DPs. Maybe. And I've done a lot of TV. That's a lot of people I've worked with.

Given that many girls are indoctrinated to believe that they should be feminine and modest about their abilities, as well as brought up to assume that girls are not innately gifted at science or math, it is not surprising that so few can see themselves as successful computer scientists.

I think being a scientist is a position of respect and power and access, and it's a privileged position in society. And I think there are fundamental mechanisms that keep men and women from achieving the same level of power and access and privilege in society.

It's always the case that the minority has to navigate two different worlds. Women have to know how to live in a man's world. Gay people have to know how to live in a straight world. Black people gotta know how to live in a predominantly white world.

I might have been lucky to grow up in the 90s, but I think, actually, we started getting complacent about prejudice. We thought we had killed prejudice, and if you were still talking about it you were just going on too much.

I'm an electrical engineer, and when I first started out, there was nobody who looked like me out there. I worked at Qualcomm, and I remember coming into meeting rooms, and I could never get the floor. I could never get my opinion across.

Differences in racial outcomes are not the same thing as institutional racism any more than the fact that far more men than women are locked up is evidence of institutional sexism.

There is still a great deal of self-hatred that we refuse to deal with because we are still measuring ourselves against the norms of a masculine, heterosexual world. That is the backdrop with which we measure the man.

I think the black community has a lot to work on internally with what they deem successful.

I realized I was a girl playing with all of these great musicians, but race and gender never did cross my mind, really, until other people started talking about them. They weren't really an issue for me.

Unfortunately, oftentimes people hire and give opportunities to people that look like them. They don't realize how much their own internal lives or privilege gets in the way of looking for people outside of the traditional spaces where they always find people.