A Quote by Hannah Bronfman
My mother is an African-American from the South Side of Chicago who married a white guy in 1978. She was hyperaware of racism and made me aware of that.
Related Quotes
There was a lot of feeling that with an African-American president, life on the South Side of Chicago would be radically different.
I once told a white South African woman that her food was as weak as the Rand, and she complained of racism. Now I watch what I say.
In 1985, I joined my mother in a protest against apartheid in which we were arrested at the South African embassy in Washington, D.C. And she was at President-elect Mandela's side in Johannesburg when he claimed victory in South Africa's first free elections.
I grew up in Synagogue in the boys' choir. We didn't listen to music in the house; only at temple. Then I went to a mostly African American high school on the South Side of Chicago and joined a gospel choir.
I think if you worked at the community level in Chicago and then a politician on the South Side of Chicago, and worked at the state level, then you're pretty familiar with all the variations of politics in the African American community and criticisms you may get. If you're not familiar with those or you don't have a thick enough skin to take it, then you probably wouldn't have gotten here.
I think there are white alumni out there who wouldn't mind having an African American president of their school, but would be reluctant to have an African American coach, because he represents the school so. I think it's just sheer backward racism.
I come from an interracial family: My father is from Nigeria, and so he is African-American, and my mother is American and white, so I rarely see skin color. It's never an issue for me.
And I come here as a daughter, raised on the South Side of Chicago - by a father who was a blue-collar city worker and a mother who stayed at home with my brother and me.
Liverpool had African players from the '50s and '60s. There were goalkeepers in the early days from South Africa. Then in 1981 there was a guy who came to Anfield. They say 'who is this guy' and it is me; I am African.
I am South African and I am so aware, even as a white, privileged South African, that even within our community of privilege the idea of talking about sex or sexual preference or sexual identity or anything like that was just, nobody ever did that and nobody ever felt comfortable doing that.
I go back to the parallels with 1963, 1964 when white America really became aware of the brutality of segregation, the cruelty of the apartheid system which existed in the south. Then white people began to get on the freedom buses and travel to the south and be part of the voter registration drives and they... some of them were beaten and some of them were murdered but they stood with the African-American community and the civil rights movement. It's time for straight people to do that today and it is time for gay people to insist that they do that today.
Mom came from what has been called the poorest place in America - Lake Providence, Louisiana. She was born on the south side of the Mississippi which was mainly African American and even poorer than the rest.
My mother always told me to embrace both sides of my background. And she also taught me one very useful thing when I was going to first grade. She said, "You're Bahamian and African-American on one side, and Russian-Jewish on the other. You're no more one than the other, and it's beautiful that you have all this. It makes your life all the more rich. But society will see you only as black."
I loved the African-American culture, but racism was still a big problem and white America was exactly what I didn't love.
My mother birthed three children and she adopted myself and another African-American son. My adoptive parents were Finnish. I grew up in a white picket neighborhood.
When I grew up on the south side of Chicago, it was kind of a rough neighborhood, and when my parents saw the prospect of my older sister going to middle school, high school, they decided that we would move to the north side of Chicago, Highland Park, and for me, that was a whole new ballgame.
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