Teresa Nielsen Hayden Quotes

I became stereotyped.

Sometimes an interviewer will look at me and say, 'You're bright!' They're actually surprised I might be bright.

There are people who are blond and blue-eyes who are walking through airports that are terrorists. There are people who look exactly like me who are terrorists.

From my situation as an African American person in the U.S., people may look at me and think a certain thing without getting to know me. I'm of Nigerian and Caribbean heritage. I went to Yale. What you see is not what you think you're getting.

I think implicit bias is a problem for everyone, not just police. I think, unfortunately, too many of us in America jump to conclusions about each other.

Consider prejudice. Once a person begins to accept a stereotype of a particular group, that "thought" becomes an active agent, "participating" in shaping how he or she interacts with another person who falls in that stereotyped class. In turn, the tone of their interaction influences the other person's behaviour. The prejudiced person can't see how his prejudice shapes what he "sees" and how he acts. In some sense, if he did, he would no longer be prejudiced. To operate, the "thought" of prejudice must remain hidden to its holder

I meet people and a lot of times, instead of saying, "Are you from the East Coast?" people just go, "you're from the East Coast, right?", having no reason to have known that. I don't know what that is. Maybe it's just that I'm Jewish.

I noticed that the work of my non - I noticed that the work of my friends who were white and male, specifically, existed in a type of freedom that was not bound by certain political questions and assumptions and locations.

I get offended when people say, 'So, being a white rapper...and growing up white...after being born white...' It's all I ever hear!

Forget that I'm a woman. Forget the accusations that I am a Right Winger demanding privilege - I had precious little privilege in my early years.

I had a white senator call me a rag head, and I had an African-American legislator call me a conservative with a tan.

I'd be stupid not to take into consideration that there are certain things people will not consider me for because my name is Lopez. And I know I can do any kind of role. I don't want anybody to say, Oh, she can't pull this off. So those are barriers that you have to overcome.

As soon as I would say I'm from Boston, people would just say, 'Naaaah!'

I went to prep school, Eton and Oxford. When people hear that, they think they know you, and you think: 'No, you don't.'

I've always felt I had to prove myself, and now it has become second nature. When I first went to university, I took lodgings with a woman who said, 'What are the chances of you staining my pans?' I said, 'I don't think I understand the question...' and she said, 'When you cook your curries.'

All labels are offensive in some way.

People look at me, and they go, 'You're white, you're smart, you must have went to college. You must have grown up with money.'

If someone's intimidated by me, that's something they have to deal with. When I walk down the streets of New York and an old woman grabs her purse when I pass by, I'm not going to give it a whole lot of energy because I'm not in the wrong. I'm a millionaire, and I'm not thinking about grabbing an old woman's purse.

Turns out typecasting is a real thing.

You know, sometimes an interviewer will look at me and say - you're bright! They're actually surprised I might be bright.

But the privileges that one has enjoyed and exploited can sometimes turn against you: nobody thinks of you as a director, you are always an actress.

Nobody's ever asked me to pay for a meal before I've eaten it, I've never been pulled over just because I was driving the wrong kind of car in the wrong kind of area at the wrong time of night.

This self imposed guilt about racial and ethnic profiling is idiocy.

To assume that just because of someone's age or gender or whatever, that they don't pose a threat would be wrong.

I resent ever being stereotyped.