Branden Jacobs-Jenkins Quotes

To ignore race and sex is racist and sexist.

Identity politics are wearisome; you don't want to go on speaking for any one group as a writer.

Once you open up the Pandora's box of race and gender... you're never done.

The demand for racial (and sexual) justice gets reduced to politics of identity - and excoriating the so-called perpetrators of the identity politics.

I was making big paintings with mythological themes. When I started painting black figures, the white professors were relieved, and the black students were like, 'She's on our side.' These are the kinds of issues that a white male artist just doesn't have to deal with.

Class, race, sexuality, gender and all other categories by which we categorize and dismiss each other need to be excavated from the inside.

Multiculturalism isn't about culture, it's about power.

I'm the result of upbringing, class, race, gender, social prejudices, and economics. So I'm a victim again. A result.

If what I read doesn't reflect my life - whether I'm gay or Latino or on welfare - doesn't that really mean that my life is not valuable?

I think it was a good and necessary thing that the American upper class diversified, and that more African-Americans and Jews and Catholics (like myself) and women now share privileges and powers once reserved for Protestant white men.

Race affects everything that I do, and everything that I create speaks to intersectionality.

I grew up in Queens, which is the most diverse borough: the rich and the poor and homeless and people of every sexual orientation and gender and age group. Everyone is saying we live in this bubble, and there's some truth to that. But I do not think it is healthy to all of a sudden invalidate the way we live in New York.

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.

Awards shows are being pushed to shed their genteel limousine liberalism and embrace the race-gender-sexual identity agenda in full.

There was a criticism of 'Milk' that I found truth in, which was that it was focused on gay white men.

Different identity groups hold specific levels of power over others when their battles play out in the media. To wit: Black beats white. Gay beats white. Black beats gay.

Victimhood, in the intersectional way of seeing the world, is akin to sainthood; power and privilege are profane.

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.

I am not a Somali representative. I am not a Muslim representative. I am not a millennial representative. I am not a woman representative. I am a representative who happens to have all of these marginalized identities and can understand the intersectionality of all of them in a very unique way.

I don't like laughing at people unless they're in a privileged position or if they're in authority. If it's poor people or people who live on the outskirts or on the margins, or the underdog, I'd rather be laughing with them.

I'm not Laverne Cox. I'm not Janet Mock... I'm just a girl from New Jersey who has experience and lived.

We live in a time of safe spaces, where micro-aggressions are monitored, where offending someone is the ultimate sin, where white people can't slip up, even once, even by accident.

I was ahead of the gender curve, but I wasn't ahead of the intersectionality curve, and I get it now. It's important to me.

'Pretty' is most often synonymous with being thin, white, able-bodied, and cis, and the closer you are to those ideals, the more often you will be labeled pretty - and benefit from that prettiness.

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.