Stacey D'Erasmo Quotes

As someone who is both an ethnic minority and openly gay, I often talk about how simply being who I am has given me a double awareness of the vulnerability that some Americans may be facing.

Do not ghettoize society by putting people into legal categories of gender, race, ethnicity, language, or other such characteristics.

If you try to smooth out society with a hot iron, you're liable to drive out all talent.

Bill Rogers has got — to his credit it’s a decent feeling — but somewhat sort of a blind spot on the black thing because he’s been in New York. He says well, they are coming along, and that, after all, they are going to strengthen our country in the end because they are strong physically and some of them are smart. My own view is I think he’s right if you’re talking in terms of 500 years. I think it’s wrong if you’re talking in terms of 50 years. What has to happen is they have been, frankly, inbred.

Our showy celebration of, and absolute insistence upon, individual autonomy and unconstrained diversity pushes those by nature least equipped to live comfortably in a liberal democracy not to the limits of their tolerance, but to their intolerant extremes.

To demand that people find their assigned narrow corridors of culture or ethnicity or gender, expecting people to forevermore stay in that lane, is to limit our human potential. It's oppressive.

I feel like there is a part of me that represents a minority in the U.S., a minority around the world. People who struggle, people who want to succeed with drive and ambition.

I have the advantage of many perspectives as someone who has lived in different kinds of communities: as a woman, as someone who previously identified as a lesbian, as someone who is a person of color. I've had a lot of life, so that informs what I do.

A lot of people think that intersectionality is only about identity. But it's also about how race and gender are structured in particular workforces.

In the case of 'Fantastic Woman,' I wanted to make it a more complex animal than just a 'cause' film. Even though I was sympathizing with the character's struggle, I didn't want to be trapped at that level - it's important, but it can be quite basic.

Women are a minority the same way gay people are.

It seems the feminists are all about female freedom of expression so long as the female is overweight or transgender. You can't pick and choose what type of women fit your agenda.

I feel that discrimination and hierarchy is something that people have to face constantly.

Something that happens to me is that I'll write a play specifically from my own experience, and then I'll inevitably be told that I'm being tunnel-visioned about it. People always ask, 'What about that other race? Or discrimination toward those people?'

The perspective that I come from when I sing, when I perform, is of who I am as a black gay man.

The gruesomeness of 'Death Line' was an absolute necessity for me to bring up the political content of the film. I wanted to show how devastating class distinction could be.

I'm the darkie you can't control!

This idea of, oh, poor little black person, oh, poor little poor person, oh, poor little woman, oh, poor little indigenous person - everybody's a poor little something! I don't try and please everybody.

I am not OK with the system that allows certain people to fail or be chucked out. I don't accept that.

Hinduism has sinned in giving sanction to untouchability.

The horror of class stratification, racism, and prejudice is that some people begin to believe that the security of their families and communities depends on the oppression of others, that for some to have good lives there must be others whose lives are truncated and brutal.

And clenching your fist for the ones like us Who are oppressed by the figures of beauty.

Whatever a 'superior' group has will be used to justify its superiority, and whatever an 'inferior' group has will be used to justify its plight. Black men were given poorly paid jobs because they were said to be 'stronger' than white men, while all women were relegated to poorly paid jobs because they were said to be 'weaker.

No privileged order ever did see the wrongs of its own victims.

Oppression involves a failure of the imagination: the failure to imagine the full humanity of other human beings.