A Quote by Don Cornelius
I was never exposed to a great deal of racism, but the Chicago I grew up in was very, very segregated.
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I grew up in a small segregated steel town 6o miles outside of Cleveland, my parents grew up in the segregated south. As a family we struggled financially, and I grew up in the '60s and '70s where overt racism ruled the day.
I grew up in New York, and I grew up with a mother who was an arts lover herself, and I went to these New York City public schools with these great arts education programs, so it was something that I was lucky enough to be able to be exposed to very early.
My mom has always been very open, very liberal. So I grew up with that, and I can appreciate everything that she did and went through and was exposed to.
We grew up in a very creative environment and were exposed to the arts at a very young age, so it's not a surprise that all of us are in some form of the arts.
In many ways, everything about my upbringing decreed that I wouldn't write a memoir because in the world where I grew up, in Chicago in the Fifties and Sixties, one key way of protesting ourselves - 'we' meaning black people - against racism, against its stereotypes and its insults, was to curate and narrate very carefully the story of the people.
Well, I've been politically involved for a really long time. Growing up in the segregated South, it was a very painful experience for me to live through the open racism of the time.
I was never exposed to art school. I grew up in an artist's studio. I was exposed a lot of studio time between of my father and a great painter I studied with in Barcelona. That was my art school, as Europe was.
The South was very segregated. I mean, all through my childhood, long after Jim Crow was supposed to not be in existence, it was still a very segregated South.
My brother and sister had a much worse childhood, I think, because they were older, and they had to deal with a lot more racism because they grew up in the '70s and I grew up more in the '80s. So they had to deal with crosses being burned on their lawn and their dogs being poisoned.
I grew up in the south of Italy, next to the sea, which was a great place to grow up. The type of life we lived there was very relaxing. Just very fun, open-minded people. It was all very sociable and low-key.
My mother grew up around horses and exposed my sister and I to riding early on. It was very important to her.
I grew during segregation in an all-black segregated neighborhood with segregated schools, etcetera. I was raised by a great father, my hero, who I much admired. So, I never really had anxiety in the way that someone like Obama would have. When he walks down the street alone, since no one knows who his mother is, they're just going to see him as a black guy.
Racism has a very quick expiration date when exposed to actual contact with people.
There is a lot of talent and a lot of good things happening and coming from Molenbeek, but unfortunately, it has had to deal with a very, very long time of being ignored, really, and it was very easy, even in the neighbourhood where I grew up, to just fall off the grid, and nobody would notice it.
Grown-up people do very little and say a great deal.... Toddlers say very little and do a great deal.... With a toddler you cannot explain, you have to show. You cannot send, you have to take. You cannot control with words, you have to use your body.
I grew up in a very religious family and it is the motivating force to every thing I do. I am fortunate to have had adults all around me who really lived their faith, in helping other people and doing the best you can do. The world wasn't so wonderful back then, with segregated rule in the South. But we were never hopeless and we never despaired because we had adults out there struggling with us, being there for us, and buffering us.
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