A Quote by Aisha Tyler
My parents were vegetarians. I'd show up at school, this giant black kid, with none of the cool clothes and a tofu sandwich and celery sticks.
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Ninety-eight percent of all the soy that's raised goes to livestock. So people make fun of vegetarians for being tofu eaters, but no one eats tofu like steak eaters, by a long shot. It's also funny that tofu is held up as what a vegetarian eats. I mean maybe I eat tofu once a month, but other than that, never. All of it, statistically speaking, is going to livestock.
I would say I'm black because my parents said I'm black. I'm black because my mother's black. I'm black because I grew up in a family of all black people. I knew I was black because I grew up in an all-white neighborhood. And my parents, as part of their protective mechanisms that they were going to give to us, made it very clear what we were.
I think who you are in school really sticks with you. I don't ever feel like the cool kid at the party, ever. It's like, 'Smile and be nice to everybody, because you were not invited to be here.'
There was certainly nothing really sexual about my youth growing up, simply because the fact remains if you're the fat kid in a school and I was the only fat black kid in the school - in fact, I was the only black kid in the school - but if you are kind of ostracized on many different levels in your school the last thing you're worried about is sex.
I was brought up in black neighborhoods in South Baltimore. And we really felt like we were very black. We acted black and we spoke black. When I was a kid growing up, where I came from, it was hip to be black. To be white was kind of square.
Vegetarians are cool. All I eat are vegetarians - except for the occasional mountain lion steak.
We were poor. My mother got our clothes out of the free box at the church, you know? So much of when you're a kid is about relating about what you watch on TV. And who's got these cooler shoes, and 'Let's trade lunches.' And I was just like, 'I don't have a television. I have a rock and a piece of tofu.'
The best thing my parents did was to make me study in Chennai. I was in a school where most others around me were also from film industry families so none of us realised what our parents were.
I never wanted to be a wild kid. I respected my parents and I had great friends. I was lucky. We did a lot of church activities. There were the bad kids in school who partied all the time, but none of my close friends did.
For years, I've been painting black men as a way to respond to the reality of the streets. I've asked black men to show up in my studio in the clothes that they want to be wearing. And often times, those clothes would be the same trappings people would see on television and find menacing.
There were only ever two black kids at my school. I never considered myself to be 'a black kid'. I was who I was. Which isn't to say things haven't happened to me that wouldn't have happened if I wasn't black.
My parents were 30 years older than I was, and my parents had my brother and I ten years apart. My parents grew up in segregation, and they both lived in all-black neighborhoods and grew up with large black families. I didn't have any of that, and I didn't understand feeling so differently and being treated so differently.
When I went to school, there were no Black philosophers, at least none that I was aware of, who were recognized by Western universities.
Today I discovered two kinds of people who go to high school: those who wear new clothes to show off on the first day, and those who wear their oldest clothes to show they think school is unimportant.
My brain still recoils at memories of the tofu stir-fries in my college co-op. A student 'cook' made them in a wok the size of a prosperous Martian's flying saucer, and, man, were they bad - steamy, crumbled bits of tofu and limp greens sloshing around in a warm bath of liquid aminos. I couldn't eat tofu for decades.
I wasn't the cool kid in school, but I wasn't the lame one. I knew I wasn't cool, so I called myself lame, and that's what made me cool in front of the cool kids.
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