Georgie Anne Geyer Quotes

It means the world to me to represent the Hispanic community.

We don't intend to always keep this necessarily African oriented. Originally I had hoped to have African American Indian of this area, and the Appalachian of this area, but at the same time, just as we have the Haitian room, we will always have room for another exhibit.

To merely observe your culture without contributing to it seems very close to existing as a ghost.

My view of myself doesn't change. I know who I am. I'm Cuban American; both my parents are Cuban - one was a little browner than the other one. That's who I am. I feel sorry that it's taken so long for the film industry to figure it out and to catch up.

Casting ethnic characters is a very hard thing to do, but it's important. It's also interesting.

It's almost as if people think that in Latin America we're not hip to what's happening here.

Should such an ignorant people lead the world? How did it come to this in the first place? 82 percent of us don't even have a passport! Just a handful can speak a language other than English.

Indians are the second largest population in the world, but we're invisible on TV - everything is either black or white.

Americans' scandalous incompetence in foreign languages also explains our dangerously inadequate understanding of world affairs.

When I first started, as long as you were a bit brown, you could play any kind of ethnic anything. Now it's much more localised and specific. I feel like a wise old woman looking back on the evolution of how much more sophisticated audiences are.

The strange dilemma of the 'ethnic-fiction' writer is that you are supposed to carry a banner for your homeland, be a voice for it, and educate the rest of the world about it, but I think that's far too onerous a burden for any writer to bear.

I want to see more Asian. I want to see more Latin. I want more Indian. There's more than Mindy Kaling out there, guys! There's more than Bai Ling.

I think the best thing I can say about it - and I think the best thing you can say about anything, really - is that 'The Motorcycle Diaries' made me feel like my home was bigger; it made me feel at home anywhere in Latin America.

I come from South America and it's part of our culture to speak out. It's a lot healthier.

The percentages of black and ethnic players compared to those in management is a massive gap. We have to make sure we work hard enough to resolve that.

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 feel like a lot of Indian fans don't know about my Indian background, so it's funny online that a lot of fans call me this Pakistani dude. No, I'm Indian, too.

I don't want to take too much responsibility, where I'm like, 'Oh, I'm representing Asia.'

I believe that sensitivity to issues of race and ethnicity is important, and nuanced, even more so when it intersects with the issue of free speech.

I had all this anxiety about what it meant to be a minority. My professors - the same men who taught me the intricacies of language - just shied away from the issue. They didn't want to talk about it, other than to suggest I could be a "role model" to other Hispanics - when I went back to my barrio, I suppose.

We know longer live in a homogenous society, it is not black, white, Asian or Latin, it is a melting pot. Until we learn to assimilate and learn about other cultures, we will continue to have racism problems. Of course, there are other '-isms' as our ills. We have sexism, ageism, elitism, homophobia-ism, there are many -isms we have to overcome.

In the case of my country, Guatemala, 65% of the inhabitants are indigenous. The constitution speaks of protection for the indigenous. Who authorized a minority to protect an immense majority? It is not only political, cultural and economic marginalization, it is an attempt against the dignity of the majority of the population.

In America there is really very little knowledge of the literature of the rest of the world. Of the literature of Latin America, yes, But that's not all that different in inspiration from that of America, or of Europe. One must go further. You don't even have to go too far in terms of geography - you can start with the Native Americans and listen to their poetry.

We [Americans] choose not to understand the world on terms other than our own.

A lot of native culture has been destroyed. So you already feel lost inside your culture. And then you add up feeling lost and insignificant inside the larger culture. So you end up feeling lost squared. And to never be recognized, to never have any power, you know, other minority communities actually have a lot of economic, cultural power.