Adrian Younge Quotes

By the time we're adults, our ideas have solidified. So I wanted to write for a younger audience, who would perhaps love heroes from other cultures.

It's important for a young black kid to see a Mexican hero, just to know that we're all equal.

I was always a wrestling fan, and being an Arab kid who grew up in Canada, there was no representation for people like me.

Every race is totally different.

It did occur to me that certainly African-Americans are not underserved in picture books, but those books are almost all about specifically black experiences.

I grew up watching foreign programs - American, English, Mexican, and very little Kenyan. 'The Color Purple' was the first time I saw people who looked like me.

When you ask your white friends what their cultural heritage is, they don't just say white. They give you a math equation. 'Well, I'm a third German and a fourth Irish and one-sixteenth Welsh and one-fortieth Native American for college applications.'

The reactions haven't differed; the concerns have been different. When I read for a predominantly Indian audience, there are more questions that are based on issues of identity and representation.

I believe we need more culturally diverse books - about disabled characters, though not about their disability, about people with different sexual orientations, or a boy who is a cross-dresser. We need to reflect the diversity of our society.

I give a speech to the black freshmen at Harvard each year, and I say, 'You can like Mozart and ice hockey...' - and then I used to say 'golf,' but Tiger took over golf! - 'and Picasso and still be as black as the ace of spades.'

Not only do I not want to be stereotyped as this Asian girl who fights - gee, what a wonder - but also I have more to offer than that.

It's not even about black and white anymore, because so many people are from mixed backgrounds and mixed ethnicities, and it's just a great time to be able to pull all that together.

We need more people working in the publishing industry itself who are people of colour.

America is grappling with cultural diversity, and I just want to put a show on that represents the world in which I live.

I am myself of a mixed background.

When I was a kid, it wasn't very often that I could go to the movies and see an entire movie carried on the shoulders of someone who looked like me.

I think all Latino actors want to be storytellers first. I want to be an actor first, and then I want to be Latina.

I have a lot of fans who are people of color. I think, if nothing else, I kind of understand that sense of being on the outside looking in, culturally.

I was the only black girl at my junior high school. I had an afro, a Jamaican accent, I looked really old.

I have to represent. I feel proud to have a culture that's different... and proud to be a Latina. We're not all categorized as one type of person... there's people from everywhere doing different things who have different types of cultures. Being Latina for me is also being a strong woman.

My life is black and white and mixed. My mother's a Rastafarian, my dad was a short white guy - it's not an affectation. It's also the lives of millions of people throughout the world.

More often than not, we think of ourselves as black, white, Asian, or Hispanic pretty much in this country, but the real America is much more than that.

I feel like elements of race and identity and ethnicity are sort of missing in all of literature, not just in women's literature.

Diversity has been written into the DNA of American life; any institution that lacks a rainbow array has come to seem diminished, if not diseased.

I like to consider myself an actor who just happens to be Hispanic.