A Quote by Issa Rae

Growing up as a young black girl in Potomac, Maryland was easy. I had a Rainbow Coalition of friends of all ethnicities, and we would carelessly skip around our elementary school like the powerless version of Captain Planet's Planeteers.
I just remember having the President's Fitness Challenge when I was in elementary school and middle school. You had to do different activities, and at the end of it, I think you got a little pin or a badge. I was like, 'How do we incorporate Captain America into high school?' You would have the 'Captain America Fitness Challenge.'
I read this book when I was young. It's about a black girl growing up in Heaven, Ohio. The cover has a black girl with clouds behind her. It was the first book cover I ever saw with a girl that looked like me.
We ran into lots of old friends. Friends from elementary school, junior high school, high school. Everyone had matured in their own way, and even as we stood face to face with them they seemed like people from dreams, sudden glimpses through the fences of our tangled memories. We smiled and waved, exchanged a few words, and then walked on in our separate directions.
I went to public school my whole life, graduated high school with my class. Growing up, I'd go to an audition, my friends would go to soccer practice and we'd all reconvene and hang out in our neighborhood. When I would book something, I would never tell my friends. Acting was just fun. I was a kid, I wasn't jaded.
I went to public school my whole life, graduated high school with my class. Growing up, I’d go to an audition, my friends would go to soccer practice and we’d all reconvene and hang out in our neighborhood. When I would book something, I would never tell my friends. Acting was just fun. I was a kid, I wasn’t jaded.
Had I not had my grandmother, who dared to be my rainbow in the clouds, I would have been just another sexually abused barefoot black girl on the roads of Arkansas.
When I think back, I felt like I had the life that a lot of white American kids grew up with in the suburbs in the States. I started noticing, as Apartheid's grip weakened, that we had more and more black kids at school; I had more and more black friends. But I never really saw a separation between myself and the black kids at school.
Something happened when I was in elementary school. A Disney artist named Bruce McIntyre retired, and he had done drawings for 'Pinocchio' and 'Snow White' that was just classic stuff. He moved to the town I grew up in, Carlsbad, and he became a part-time art teacher at our elementary school.
Growing up in Jersey City was interesting. I got to learn a lot about different cultures: I had Hindu friends, Middle Eastern friends, black friends, Spanish friends.
I think my magical dream land would have all of my friends from high school and elementary school. I'm extremely nostalgic so my closest friends are people from my childhood.
I didn't have the easiest childhood. I was never the popular girl in school growing up. I was always the lone black girl or the lone fat girl or the long tall girl, so that has made me more compassionate to all people. It also gave me the drive and ambition to go after my dreams in a big way.
I can always remember standing up to the baddest girls in my elementary school. Wherever I went, there was always a mean girl, and that girl would always hate me because I wouldn’t bow down.
I knew Pluto was popular among elementary schoolkids, but I had no idea they would mobilize into a 'Save Pluto' campaign. I now have a drawer full of hate letters from hundreds of elementary schoolchildren (with supportive cover letters from their science teachers) pleading with me to reverse my stance on Pluto. The file includes a photograph of the entire third grade of a school posing on their front steps and holding up a banner proclaiming, 'Dr. Tyson - Pluto is a Planet!'
I was a team captain, I was the guy for the first couple years. And then all of the sudden I was just the backup. It wasn't easy. I think it would be easy to bow my head and feel sorry for myself, but I knew as a captain I had to be a great teammate.
8 year old young girl came up to me when I went to speak at an elementary school, and she gave me a drawing. It was great and she said "I want to be just like you when I grow up and direct movies". And that just made me choke up. It was so cute, and the reason why she's looking at me is I look like her.
When it comes to racial issues, I'm very passionate about young girls just loving who they are in their own skin. Because I remember going to an all-white school and being the only black girl in an all-white school, think - looking around me, thinking there's no one else here that looks like me.
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