Todd Haynes Quotes

The system of domination is founded on depriving nations of their true identity. It seeks to deprive nations of their culture, identity, self-confidence and in this way dominate them.

Sometimes people of color walk into these spaces that are dominated by the dominant culture, and we have to be better, not make as much trouble.

I come from a place where we feel like we're not represented in the national media.

I can't discriminate? Oh, that's ripe, coming from a straight white man. What's the matter, baby doesn't feel like he belongs? Well why don't you try a place that was set up just for you? Like the world!

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?

When you're told that as a filmmaker of colour, the stories you want to tell aren't commercial enough, then you start thinking, 'I'm going to tell them anyway.'

I am from the class that has, in a sense, benefited from the status quo, but everyone still gets victimized.

Every social injustice is not only cruel, but it is economic waste.

In every truth, the beneficiaries of a system cannot be expected to destroy it.

The oppressed, having internalized the image of the oppressor and adopted his guidelines, are fearful of freedom.

I think if you say that art and politics, or religion and politics, mustn't mix, don't mix, that is itself a political statement. Even if you are writing a 19th-century novel where the money comes from a plantation in the Caribbean and you don't talk about that, that itself is a political thing.

I'm not allowing my perspective to be dictated by the dominant culture.

When someone lives as a minority, they experience the world differently than those of us who live in the majority. We may occupy the same physical space, but we don't occupy the same psychic space.

Something happened during the 1980s - perhaps the political climate of that time - that caused me to ask how a people would become part of a system that oppresses their own people.

African-Americans are always forced to learn the other culture, but the other culture is not forced to learn ours. I went to acting school at Juilliard, and we learned Shakespeare and Shaw, but we never did the work of a single African-American playwright, not August Wilson or Ntozake Shange or Imir Baraka.

If we accept the rule of those who think they are the bosses and lords of Mexico, nothing will change for the people on the bottom.

Do I have to see movies and television about the English throne or the Holocaust every year? There are multiple multi-million dollar movies with the same backdrop. But our Holocaust - meaning Latino - aren't ever told.

The margins don't get erased by simply insisting that the powers-that-be erase them.

The more dependent you are, the more ignorant you must be, and that's how they want you.

Remember that our Spanish conquerors, for their own benefit, deliberately created an oppressed underclass whose collective psyche became rooted in passivity and underachievement.

Old white people have pretty much always been the bad guys, the keepers of the hegemonic and reactionary flame, the folks unwilling to share the category of American with others on equal terms.

Part of the process of colonization (cultural conquest and domination) is the replacement of the celebrated drugs of the colonized with the celebrated drugs of the colonizer.

Power is being able to affect the hegemony of existing systems.

The history of an oppressed people is hidden in the lies and the agreed-upon myth of its conquerors.

Social change can be painful for all involved—oppressor and oppressed.