Cultural Invisibility Quotes

Specifically, in Canada, the First Nations are often overlooked in pop culture or in general, and when things are reported about our First Nations, it's often negative things - about the hardships they face and what-not.

I remember distinctly not seeing myself. I didn't see myself in black culture, white culture, mass culture.

The history of other cultures is non-existent until it erupts in confrontation with the United States.

As a person of color, I was just really tired of the fact that I wasn't seeing my story in the culture.

It is a very grave matter to be forced to imitate a people for whom you know-which is the price of your performance and survival-you do not exist. It is hard to imitate a people whose existence appears, mainly, to be made tolerable by their bottomless gratitude that they are not, thank heaven, you.

When it comes to American Indians, mainstream America suffers from willful blindness.

There is a problem in America. An Irish or Polish American can write a story and it's an American story. When a Black American writes a story, it's called a Black story. I take exception to that. Every artist has articulated to his own experience. The problem is that some people do not see Blacks as Americans.

There are many Latino writers as talented as I am, but because we are published through small presses, our books don't count. We are still the illegal aliens of the literary world.

Culture hides much more than it reveals, and strangely enough, what it hides, it hides most effectively from its own participants.

For the majority of the time, I may as well have been just a really tan white kid. You know, I may as well have just been, like, a fat kid.

To be an Indian in modern American society is in a very real sense to be unreal and ahistorical.

So many Indian novels, quite unfairly, do not get the prominence they should because they have been written in a language other than English.

When I first came out to L.A., Hollywood's idea of a Latina was Mexican. It was almost like they had never seen or heard of an Afro-Latina before.

As the Chinese girl, you don't fit in with anybody. It wasn't a large Chinese-American population, so I didn't grow up having a community of Asian friends. Even when there were Asian people, we sort of existed on our own.

People are often shy to acknowledge that they are Bengalis. They somehow take pride in saying that they cannot speak or read the language.

I end up feeling like a spy in the house of ethnicity, you know? Because people will talk around me as they would talk around the people in their cultural group. So I get to hear all the secrets and jokes and you know, I'm a part of every community because of the way I look.

In movies and television shows, there has never been a really good Chinese lead. So often the Chinese look like they are very scared and shy.

For me, personally, I didn't see many people like me on TV growing up.

But also, there are no films being made about Afghanistan.

If you were to turn on the TV in 1986, '87, you wouldn't see anybody having, I guess, a low-to-middle-income person of color experience. And you definitely wouldn't have a young LGBT person or their story told. The experience of being invisible in our culture has ramifications that I don't think any of us can really understand.

You are an American, so you're hurt that other American citizens have been hurt, but you end up having to shoulder the shame for something that you don't even believe. There's a lot of years where Muslims have dealt with having to make themselves very small and not disrupt the flow and not - make sure that you're not noticed because, you know, deep down inside people are not really excited that you're around .