A Quote by Courtney B. Vance
Around 1969, my family had just bought a house in a lower-middle-class white neighborhood two blocks away from school. Then, all of a sudden, all the white people left the neighborhood and the school.
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If you have an all-white neighborhood you don't call it a segregated neighborhood. But you call an all-black neighborhood a segregated neighborhood. And why? Because the segregated neighborhood is the one that's controlled by the ou - from the outside by others, but a separate neighborhood is a neighborhood that is independent, it's equal, it can do - it can stand on its own two feet, such as the neighborhood. It's an independent, free neighborhood, free community.
If you're going to compare a middle-income black kid with a middle- income white kid, and, say, you control for family background, family education, and family income, and if this middle-income black kid doesn't score as well as the white kid on the test, then I say, look, you haven't taken into consideration the cumulative effect of living in a segregated neighborhood and going to a de facto segregated school. You're denying a position at Harvard or some other place to a kid that really could make it. That's why I support affirmative action that's based on both class and race.
I was born in San Francisco's Chinatown in 1948 but grew up in a black neighborhood. During elementary and middle school, I commuted to a bilingual school in Chinatown. So I did not confront white American culture until high school.
I'm sure everything has a bearing on what I'm doing. My family is a lower-middle-class family, there's lots of children, seven brothers, two sisters grew up together, fighting with each other, went to school. My mother went to school up to 4th grade. My father went to school up to 8th grade. So that's about the education level we had in the family.
When I was just 13, we went from being middle class to lower middle class and finally lower class, as someone close to my father took away everything he had, including his property. All of a sudden, I started working at the age of 13.
One day I was teaching my class and then I had to go to the White House right after, so literally, I took my dress to school. After my classes I went into the ladies room, changed into my outfit, got into the car, went to the White House. So there are real, you know, Superman moments!
My neighborhood is fairly white, yet the local middle school is all black. It is bad. It is very bad.
I went to school for singing, middle school at LaGuardia High School. Followed by Berkeley College of Music and afterwards I went to acting school at the Neighborhood Playhouse for Theater.
In Maryland, I didn't grow up around poor white people. Where I grew up, the white people were middle class or upper-middle class. It's interesting how screwed up it is in reality, because most people who receive assistance from the government are white, but not in my head or in my experience.
I don't see anything wrong with a neighborhood association wanting to keep their neighborhood a certain way or their apartment complex a certain way. I don't see anything wrong with white kids wanting to go to school with white children, or black kids wanting to go to school with black kids.
When I was in college, I lived in a mostly black, poor neighborhood. That's where I grew up, but I attended a mostly white upper-class school in conservative Mississippi. I was often very aware of how I presented myself.
When I was younger, living in an all-black neighborhood the other kids thought I was better than them because of my light skin and straight hair. Then we moved to an all-white neighborhood and that was a culture shock ... I'd been used to being around all black kids.
I was the only white kid in my neighborhood for most of my youth even in high school, so reverse racism was just as apparent as racism.
When I talk about my artist parents, people imagine a bohemian environment and think, 'Aha, so that's where he gets it from!' But we were as white, straight, and middle-class as the next family on our white, straight, middle-class housing estate.
I was brought up in a very naval, military, and conservative background. My father and his friends had very typical opinions of the British middle class - lower-middle class actually - after the war. My father broke into the middle class by joining the navy. I was the first member of my family ever to go to private school or even to university. So, the armed forces had been upward mobility for him.
'Sons' was about working class white guys. And even though I didn't grow up in a motorcycle club, I grew up in a working-class, white-guy neighborhood.
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