stereotype resistance Quotes

It's taken a while for me to convince people that I can do something other than Scully. And it still takes effort.

For whatever reason, I didn't succumb to the stereotype that science wasn't for girls. I got encouragement from my parents. I never ran into a teacher or a counselor who told me that science was for boys. A lot of my friends did.

Women are always self-effacing and self-denying. There's a term that enrages me, and I always used to swear that I'd never play characters described that way. The term is "long-suffering."

Black males who refuse categorization are rare, for the price of visibility in the contemporary world of white supremacy is that black identity be defined in relation to the stereotype whether by embodying it or seeking to be other than it…Negative stereotypes about the nature of black masculinity continue to overdetermine the identities black males are allowed to fashion for themselves.

Long gone is the time when we opposed the notion that we all looked alike and talked alike. Somehow we have come to exalt the new black stereotype above all and to demand conformity to that norm... [However], I assert my right to think for myself, to refuse to have my ideas assigned to me as though I was an intellectual slave because I'm black.

I'm an only child, so I never had sisters to tell me what I should like based on my gender. I liked what the boys were doing and thought: 'Why let them have all the fun?'

I prefer to be known as an executive rather than a girl.

I've always wrestled against being typified in one way or another.

The most interesting nerds are the ones who take offense to being called nerds.

I'm not angry. And I don't like the thing of the 'angry black woman,' either.

As black people we were out to further our equality. I don't pay attention to the controversial connotations put on by media and the undermining labels they place on us. We pay attention to what our community situation is and what we need.

There's a tendency to treat anyone with a physical disability as inspiring. I call it a pedestal of prejudice, in that you're lifting people up to dismiss them. My whole thing is bringing us down to everyone else's level and saying we're all the same. The struggle is the same.

This is, for an accomplished Latino, an accomplished African American, an accomplished anyone who disproves stereotypes, it's a constant battle in your life.

Early in my career, people wanted to pigeonhole me as the bad guy because I'm of Italian-American descent, which they often were when I started out. You have to fight against it. One of the things that helps is the ability to do comedy.

I think it's about time people stopped judging women on their appearance and more on their intellect. Like you can appreciate my style without having to appreciate my weight. It's not actually mutually exclusive. I just get frustrated because just because I exist in this shape doesn't mean that I'm like advocating it.

I admire about Hillary: Every time I am going to walk away from her candidacy, I think, she has absorbed more hate than anyone I can think of over the past twenty years, and she hasn't cracked under it. That's a kind of iron fortitude that maybe we need in the President of the United States. People project on to Hillary because she is a woman. They either hate her for everything they hate about women or they long for her to be everything they want in a woman. It's an impossible burden.

It is challenging and hard not to accept all stereotypical roles that get thrown your way. For me, I've been really, really lucky because I have been able to play a lot of different parts.