Angie Thomas Quotes

Don Cornelius gave me an incredulous look regarding my accent. I lessened it; he gave a nod of approval. Instantly, I felt ashamed. I had made my first conscious effort not to sound ethnic.

I've been told that I wasn't Latino enough, which was code for 'street' enough.

As a black woman who grows up in a predominantly white neighborhood, you learn how to perform a 'good' version of yourself. And then when you're with your home girls, you're saying all kinds of stuff that sounds all kinds of crazy, but you understand each other because you're speaking the way that you're comfortable with.

Black women, whose experience is unique, are seldom recognized as a particular social-cultural entity and are seldom thought to be important enough for serious scholarly consideration.

There was no audience for my books. The Indians didn't regard me as an Indian and North Americans couldn't conceive of me of a North American writer, not being white and brought up on wheat germ. My fiction got lost.

Politicians have forced us into parallel societies by denying for so long that we existed and pretending for so long that we were going home.

I know that some people, when they are growing up and they - as a person of color in a majority community - that they may feel as if they are left out, or they feel a bit strange.

There's a belonging problem in Hollywood. Who dictates who belongs? The very body who dictates that looks all one way.

I'm mixed race, and it's often hard for me to fit into period pieces.

By virtue of their being regarded as something "exceptional," even by friends and well-wishers, Negroes of attainment and genius have been unfairly disassociated from the group, and group credit lost accordingly.

I am one of them. I am a black woman, the daughter of a dining car waiter. You do not seem to understand who I am.

There's this homogenization, this big sucking motion in dominant society, to absorb all the disparate elements that define the margin or define the culture or define those who are thrust outside the status quo.

White America don't get to dictate how me and Shaq talk to each other.

I identified with white culture, and I wanted to fit in. I didn't identify with black culture. Like, I didn't like Tyler Perry movies, and I wasn't into hip-hop music. I liked Neil Young.

Parts for Asians are hard enough to get, and if Tee, which sounds kind of generically Asian, helps me get roles, so be it.

I was very conscious of the world being this very crazed place that demanded explanation. I didn't see a whole lot of people who looked like me doing it on television.

The difficulty of being Afro-Latina, in general, is the lack of acceptance in both communities.

When you are young, coming into this business, you're told how the business works, and you feel very lucky to be here and want to stick around, so you believe the data, and you believe the conversations you're having where they say, 'You can't have that kind of lead because they don't travel here,' or, 'People will think it's not for them.'

Pop culture says that if a black girl is to be taken seriously, she has to assimilate and be as white as possible, to the point of bleaching her hair blonde.

I think that, as a black girl, you grow up internalizing all these messages that say you shouldn't accept your hair or your skin tone or your natural features or that you shouldn't have a voice or that you aren't smart.

The color and the diversity dies out, and it gets whiter and whiter, and that's in any field. There is also this idea that there can only be one gay person or there can only be one Asian-American woman in the office, and so it also perpetuates itself where we are isolated, especially the more successful we get.

Especially for blacks, but also for many Hispanics, Native Americans, and Asian-Americans, group identity is now shaped more by a liberal politics in which past victimization is deferred to, and for which redress is sought with preferential treatment, than by a unified culture.

I often hear things like, 'You don't look Latina enough,' and that mentality is so backwards. The fact is, I am Latina, so how are you going to tell me that I don't look Latina?

I was born in 1947, and my generation, like its predecessors, was taught that since our achievements received little notice or credit from white America, we were not to discuss our faults, lapses, or uncertainties in public.

Issues that have relevance to the tribal community have routinely been minimized and ignored.