Jenny Zhang Quotes

With any sort of minority, issues of ostracization or misrepresentation are clearly rampant. It's just so deeply rooted in our culture, and there are so many levels that it trickles down from.

One can fall into the 'soft bigotry of low expectations.'

Stan said he used to keep Hardy late, make him miss his golf game, and really get him mad.

If you are socially isolated, you are more vulnerable to stereotypes and myths; you won't have the opportunity to have conversations with someone who has a different social background than you.

Every now and then I'm in a situation where someone doesn't recognize me, and I experience racism. Things like not being buzzed into a store or sitting in first class on a plane and having someone ask to see my ticket four times.

I can be standing in Barneys with my coat and purse and my selections, and some white woman will say, 'Can you get this in my size?' What she sees is a black woman, and her service button goes off.

It's not even race; it's a certain type of person that gets 'Pootie Tang.'

Yeah, I'm sure there are stereotypes of Asian people.

I was an aspiring astrophysicist, and that's how I defined myself, not by my skin color. People didn't treat me as someone with science ambitions. They treated me as someone they thought was going to mug them, or who was a shoplifter.

I thought I'd been condescended to as an Indian - that was nothing compared to the condescension for writing young adult literature.

Even if you have something that you can contribute to society, very often society doesn't view you that way. Because when you are The Other, the first response by the mainstream, if you will, is to ostracize.

For decades, scholars have studied the ways in which implicit biases affect how we perceive other people in this multiethnic society of ours. The data consistently shows that about 90 percent of us possess some implicit prejudices - and, unsurprisingly, people typically favor their own group.

I actually spoke to one of the heads of a studio, and he said I confuse middle America. Basically, when they see a black person, they see athlete, they see rapper, or they see criminal or something like that. And then when they hear a British accent, they hear posh, so they hear lawyer or doctor.

I do not want to name any individual names, but I felt like when I was working in Hollywood, there were some fellow colleagues of mine who didn't even look me in the eyes because I was Asian.

American prejudices about Europe rarely surface in headlines, but they are real, pervasive, and ingrained.

Maybe at some level, even at an early age, without ever being aware of it, I was reacting to something. To people judging me based on how I looked instead of what I could do.

If you're white working with non-white people, you will be branded as a colonialist by some people, regardless of your efforts or intentions.

No one is ever bias-free, but some people let their biases influence their actions more than others.

I think that there's still a lot of prejudice going on. I don't really think it's only an issue of football. I think football is a mirror of society.

I feel like a lot of people disregard the scrutiny that people like us are under.

It is frustrating having to walk through America having to bob and weave people's impressions of me because they see a tall black guy walking down the street. That is frustrating.

I'm African-American. There are more eyes on me than anybody. They're going to take the negative before the positive.

I like to look at it as things and people and whole society in general being uneducated about facts. There are a lot of stereotypes. But I don't see color, I don't see race.

You walk into a room and there's already judgment. You know, like football players can't act or you're going to come in and be stiff.

It makes me sad that our kids are growing up in a country where they are American but, in a sense, have to prove it. They can't just be who they are like everyone else. Who they are is something suspicious, something scary, something misunderstood.