Diversity in Television Quotes

Sex in the City was a different kind of phenomenon because of the show itself is a phenomenon and to me that's successful because to resonate with women across the board for six years and have only one African-American actor pass through for one episode.

I think television is doing a better job than films in terms of representing people, but television is still not diverse.

With my representation of a black woman in the world today, there's such a powerful response from my community about what it means to have black representation on television. That response is so overwhelming and so strong that I just have to express my own gratitude for it, because I understand the necessity for it.

We're in the second golden age of television, and to me, one of the most profound things that's happening in TV is just that by default that opened the door to more women, more people of color, more outliers. It's one of the greatest side effects of the digital revolution.

When I was nine years old, Star Trek came on, I looked at it and I went screaming through the house, 'Come here, mum, everybody, come quick, come quick, there's a black lady on television and she ain't no maid!' I knew right then and there I could be anything I wanted to be.

So many people complain that there aren't enough Latinos on television, and yet when they are, they need support.

I felt like it was a courageous show [Black-ish] from the beginning. We are a black family - we're not a family that happens to be black. But the show is not even about us being black. The show is about us being a family. That is groundbreaking - on TV, the black characters either happen to be black or they're the "black character," where everything they say is about being black. I think that's the genius.

CBS really wants me on TV. That's their aim. My aim is to have an all-gay sitcom someday, with heterosexuals as token guest stars. Let them be the next-door neighbors for a change.

A Different World was run by black women, Debbie Allen and Yvette Lee Bowser. Lead writer Susie Fales-Hill was a hero of mine, because she was 28 when she was running one of the top shows on television. Going to work every day and seeing black women in charge made that normal to me.

Considering the popularity of soaps with the African-American audience, it's grotesque that the entertainment industry, for all its vaunted liberalism, is lagging so far behind social changes in the United States. And why has there never been an all-black daytime network soap? It would probably blow the white soaps off the map.

I think we need great artists making great work - women, men, whoever. I think what's great about TV now is there are so many different platforms that you can make really specific, specialized content. I wouldn't have gotten this part because I'm not really considered a "traditional romantic lead," so I created it for myself.

Thank god Shonda Rhimes had this agenda to make television look like life, to make it look like the real world.

Television had a black president long before Barack Obama.

I sat down with CBS, and we talked about me developing a show for them. At the time, I was meeting with a lot of networks. And I told them, 'I don't want to be acting on your show as the token black guy. I want to do something that will change a network and will change the way people view African-Americans on TV.'

Shows like 'Superstore' and certainly 'Pose' are leading the way and showing queer people of color in a much more complex, nuanced light that we've never seen.

For a long time, TV was just the land of handsome, beautiful people, and now it's the opposite.

This moment right here, me standing up here all brown with my boobs and my Thursday night of network television full of women of color, competitive women, strong women, women who own their bodies and whose lives revolve around their work instead of their men, women who are big dogs, that could only be happening right now.