Jewell Parker Rhodes Quotes

Let me speak for myself: I think I wanted to see people who looked like me on TV. I wanted to see people who had similar experiences as I had, growing up. There was nobody on television when I was a teenager who I could relate to.

People have asked me about playing outsiders. I don't consider myself an outsider. Maybe that's why I'm interested in that. I'm not really sure.

I love writing about black women, but if you go beyond that, we're human beings - and because we're human beings, it's universal for everybody.

People identify with me - everyone does - African American women, Caucasian women, they all identify with me because I'm ethnic.

In fact, some reviewers have said that as they got into the story they forgot that the protagonist is a black woman. They were moved by the story - by the people as a whole - and not by the little things.

I'm hoping that the legacy of 'Girlfriends' is just that you can enjoy and connect to Joan, Maya, Toni, Lynn, and William and see your humanity reflected in theirs. That's what I'm hoping that it did.

I know it's 'Dear White People,' and you can imprint all kinds of concessions about what the show might be about on the title, but my goal was never to, like, educate white people. My goal was always to create characters that you can relate to and fall in love with.

I think it's important to have diversity in comics for a thousand reasons. It's not just some airy conceptual thing: it's important to reflect the humanity of the readership.

I want children to look at me and see my face and I want them to see their faces reflected in mine.

I am an 'other.' As a queer, biracial man who occupies and embodies many different intersections of 'otherness,' I've spent my entire life seeking reflections of myself in the world around me to connect and relate to.

People are people, and they want to know about their own experiences.

I approach writing female characters the same why I approach writing male characters. I never think I'm writing about women, I think I'm writing about one woman, one person. And I try to imagine what she is like, and endow her with a lot of my own thoughts and history.

I loved reading when I grew up but did feel totally invisible because I couldn't see myself and my life reflected in the books I was reading.

If we truly seek diversity in fiction, we have to let the needs of others come before our need to define ourselves as social justice allies.

Since becoming aware of the need to be inclusive, I've tried to make my stories broader and more representative of our world.

I'm a fully paid-up member of the human race.

When I meet a new person, I am on the lookout for signs of what he or she is loyal to. It is a preliminary clue to the sense of belonging, and hence of his or her humanity.

There's drama in everything. That's why I love movies. Like 'Welcome to the Dollhouse.' I'm a 350-pound black man, and I could understand what it was like to be a little white girl.

We all know the power of film; we all know there's almost nothing more powerful than to see people on film that look and talk like you, like we do.

I relate to most of the characters I play, because I do feel like an outsider.

I'm Italian and Spanish and Jewish. I'm 100 different things meshed into one. I think that shows girls that uniqueness is beautiful. They can look at me on a magazine cover and see me in a movie and say that they have someone they can relate to.

With literature, sometimes a book is presented in the media as being say, a Muslim story or an African story, when essentially it's a universal story which we can all relate to it, no matter what race or social background we come from.

I make films about black women and it doesn't mean that you can't see them as a black man, doesn't mean that he can't see them as a white man or she can't see them as a white woman.

I prefer to think of myself as able to represent all walks of life.

It's very important to me that people get to see themselves in stories. When someone tells me they've never seen themselves, I have a new goal.