A Quote by Ava DuVernay

If you're doing something outside of dominant culture there's not an easy place for you. You will have to do it yourself. — © Ava DuVernay
If you're doing something outside of dominant culture there's not an easy place for you. You will have to do it yourself.
If you're doing something outside of dominant culture, there's not an easy place for you. You will have to do it yourself.
Many teachers of the Sixties generation said "We will steal your children", and they did. A significant part of America has converted to the ideas of the 1960s - hedonism, self-indulgence and consumerism. For half of all Americans today, the Woodstock culture of the Sixties is the culture they grew up with - their traditional culture. For them, Judeo-Christian culture is outside the mainstream now. The counter-culture has become the dominant culture, and the former culture a dissident culture - something that is far out, and 'extreme'.
I was on television a couple of years ago and the reporter asked me, "How does it feel being on mainstream media? It's not often poets get on mainstream media." I said, "Well I think you're the dominant media, the dominant culture, but you're not the mainstream media. The mainstream media is still the high culture of intellectuals: writers, readers, editors, librarians, professors, artists, art critics, poets, novelists, and people who think. They are the mainstream culture, even though you may be the dominant culture."
I'm not against other cultures, but I believe what the Germans call a "leitkultur", a dominant culture that we should have, even in our constitution state, what our dominant culture is and that our laws should apply to that culture and to no other one.
There was a time when I was knocking on doors and concerned with being recognized in dominant culture. I've found a space where the terrain is different, where I'm embraced by people like me, and where I'm building new ways of doing things, as opposed to trying to insert myself in a place that might not be welcoming.
America is a great country. It has a lot of work to do. The bottom line is it's easy to talk; it's easy to have the media pick up on something, and it's hard to have the patience to put something in place you can build on that will make sure each citizen has their equal rights.
We should never denigrate any other culture but rather help people to understand the relationship between their own culture and the dominant culture. When you understand another culture or language, it does not mean that you have to lose your own culture.
Doing drag in a male-dominant culture is an act of treason. It's the most punk-rock thing you can do.
You have to remember that writing those sorta songs is not reality, it's more like trance, dream, y'know, like dreamwork. The mythical thing can enter the creating but there's the mythical place and the real place. And there's both...I get it between waking and sleeping. Or, when I'm doing something else. I don't sit down and think I'm gonna write about subject X or subject Y. I could be doing something and an impression comes in from outside and the song emerges out of that. It's never thought about or contrived.
If you begin to have a relationship where you're doing what the guards want, and once you're out you will see that as a treason, a treason to your country, a treason to yourself, a treason to everybody, so you have to be very cautious on what is the perspective you're looking at yourself, and you have always to see yourself like from the outside.
One of the fun things about being an actor is stepping outside yourself and outside of your own experience. It's challenging yourself to totally commit to something that in your core is so wrong.
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.
The percentage of Indian kids doing some sort of artistic work is much higher than in the general population - painting, drawing, dancing, singing. The creation of art is still an everyday part of Indian culture, unlike the dominant culture, where art is sort of peripheral.
Indeed, as long as a country has a culture a religion an ideology where Islam is dominant it will never be a democracy.
If happiness comes at all: which is by no means prearranged; it comes by the way, while you are seeking for something else. Something outside yourself, beyond yourself: in a brief absorption of self-forgetfulness.
Nobody is going to just come and give you money unless you've proven yourself, especially if you're doing something that is unconventional or unorthodox and outside the way the industry thinks.
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