Jenny Zhang Quotes

You know, I love all kinds of activism. I certainly think blacks deserve to have something whether it is affirmative action or an opportunity that should be opened up to them. But at the same time I believe that people of color are not the only poor people in America and all over the world.

To abandon affirmative action is to say there is nothing more to be done about discrimination.

If you are brown, black, Asian, or anything other than an English-speaking, highly-trained technician, the Republican Party doesn't want you here.

People are making a lot more noise about representation and diversity. But I think modeling is one of the professions where people can be kind of racist.

When I got into Stanford in high school, I had some friends from school who told me that I just got in because I was black and whatnot.

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.

The only difference between me and those other great Yankees is my skin color.

In Australia, there just weren't strong roles for actors of colour. I was often being asked to turn up for commercials with a ghetto blaster on my shoulder. I thought, 'Are we in the '60s?'

Why are some people bullied? Because they are different. How? It doesn't matter.

I was the first South Asian female to do comedy videos on YouTube. But at the same time, all races face their barriers, and I've learned through YouTube, if it's not race, it will be sexism, if it's not sexism, it will be homophobia. It will always be something, and all voices should be heard.

When I first started, all the media I ever got was, 'Hey! There's this Indian girl. And even though she is Indian, she gets views and stuff.'

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

I think that if we really want to break it down, that non-black filmmakers have had many, many years and many, many opportunities to tell many, many stories about themselves, and black filmmakers have not had as many years, as many opportunities, as many films to explore the nuances of our reality.

Discrimination has a lot of layers that make it tough for minorities to get a leg up.

Like one of any minority, I have experienced prejudice.

I am trained, and I did do 'The Nutcracker' in its right form, but at the time, they told me I was black and I'd never be in 'Swan Lake.' I went through all those prejudices in the ballet community, and I still emerged wonderfully trained and found my way to Alvin Ailey where there were familiar faces.

The feeling of being an underdog, not belonging, is very much me. You harbour a little feeling of resentment towards the 'upper dog'.

I think we always view people who make us feel uncomfortable and appear to intrude on our middle-class cozy space, we view them with, if not hostility, at least suspicion, discomfort, embarrassment.

Black literature is taught as sociology, as tolerance, not as a serious, rigorous art form.

I was too Jewish for 'Flashdance.'

I was fortunate enough to have been raised to a certain point before I got into the race thing. I had other views of what a human is, so I was never able to see racism as the big question. Racism was horrendous, but there were other aspects to life.

I came from Yale, where you get an extracurricular degree in self-importance because you went there. When AIDS happened, I was treated like an outcast. And I don't like that feeling.

Television shows and movies that are all white, I can't watch them. They totally alienate me.

It's really maddening out there for dark-skinned actresses in terms of the opportunities we get. There's just so much talent that is being overlooked.

The melting pot failed to function in one crucial area. Religions and nationalities, however different, generally learned to live together, even to grow together, in America. But color was something else. Reds were murdered like wild animals. Yellows were characterized as a peril and incarcerated en masse during World War II for no really good reason by our most liberal President. Browns have been abused as the new slave labor on farms. The blacks, who did not come here willingly, are now, more than a century after emancipation by Lincoln, still suffering a host of slavelike inequalities.