A Quote by Alicia Garza
Growing up in a school that was majority white, my understanding of the world was that I was different but that differences shouldn't be talked about because it's uncomfortable.
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I got bullied so much growing up for being a different color in a majority white school.
Obviously, race is the elephant in the room, and we all understand that. Unless it is talked about constantly, it's not going to get better... people have to be made to feel uncomfortable, and especially white people, because we're comfortable. We still have no clue what being born white means.
The interesting thing was we never talked about pottery. Bernard [Leach] talked about social issues; he talked about the world political situation, he talked about the economy, he talked about all kinds of things.
It is only because the majority opinion will always be opposed by some that our knowledge and understanding progress... it is always from a minority acting in ways different from what the majority would prescribe that the majority in the end learns to do better.
It's very white in Guernsey, not racist, but there's not a lot of understanding about different cultures there. So I grew up there then moved to Brighton and found all these other people with different experiences, different narratives.
Growing up in this post-apartheid era, the first generation of teens in South Africa living in this new democracy, I often found myself feeling different. I was often the only person of color in an otherwise all-white school. And within the Indian community, because of my training with an English acting teacher, my accent was very different.
I was definitely considered different growing up. I learned that being me was all right because my family celebrated those differences.
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.
With this book in my hands, reading aloud to my friends, questioning them, explaining to them, I was made clearly to understand that I had no friends, that I was alone in the world. Because in not understanding the meaning of the words, neither I nor my friends, one thing became very clear and that was that there were ways of not understanding and that the difference between the non-understanding of one individual and the non-understanding of another created a world of terra firma even more solid than differences of understanding.
We need a whole bunch of books about people of color, kids on the spectrum, etc. It's strange that we have a population of school children that is majority nonwhite but their books are majority white.
When people talked about protecting their privacy when I was growing up, they were talking about protecting it from the government. They talked about unreasonable searches and seizures, about keeping the government out of their bedrooms.
My mother talked about the stories I used to spin as a child of three, before I started school. I would tell this story about what school I went to and what uniform I wore and who I talked to at lunchtime and what I ate, and my mother was like, 'This girl does not even go to school.'
Growing up, at that time, I didn't want to be black because I was bullied, and I'd tell my mum that I wanted to be white like everyone else at school.
As for the Jewish-American question, what's funny is that I grew up in India, and the Jewish-American comparison is better for second-generation Asians. I'm sure there's something about globalization that has globalized our neuroses, so that I, growing up in India, somehow turned out very similar to you. It's a weird thing, when you think about it, but everyone now is exposed to a mainstream white American world, wherever you are. And so there's this need to belong or measure yourself up to that white world, which leads to all sorts of straining.
Because if you weren't born white, you were forced to see differences; or if you weren't born what they called normal, or if you got injured, then you were left to explore the world of the different.
I'm Asian-American, and I was the only Chinese girl growing up in a white school in San Diego. So I understood what it was like to be different, to always want to fit in and never feel like you ever could.
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