A Quote by Michael Franti

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. — © Michael Franti
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.
My father has passed away. He was African-American. My mother is white. So I was adopted by a couple that was of a similar dynamic as my biological parents.
I would say I'm black because my parents said I'm black. I'm black because my mother's black. I'm black because I grew up in a family of all black people. I knew I was black because I grew up in an all-white neighborhood. And my parents, as part of their protective mechanisms that they were going to give to us, made it very clear what we were.
I grew up with a pretty tough mom. She was a self-appointed neighborhood watchdog, and if she saw that any of the local boys were up to no good, she would scold them on the spot. Although she is only 5 feet 2, she was famous in our neighborhood for intimidating men three times her size and getting them to do the right thing.
We grew up in a very strange world, because my mother was up against it all when she had three black children.
Reggie Campbell and Kathleen Goldsmith are participants in an American success story, the unprecedented boom of home-buying by African-Americans in the 1990s. Only he is black and she is white. When he moved into the neighborhood, she moved out.
Finnish forests: Let us remind the satellite pictures of the 1970's winter in which the old forest appeared black and young forest and cut downs white. Already then the Finnish borders were like drawn on the map: White Finland between black Karelian and black Sweden. Finnish Forest Research Institute hicced up some time and then decided that the pictures are fake.
I am suspicious - first of all, in myself - of adopted mysticisms of glib spirituality, above all of white people's tendency to ... vampirize American Indian, or African, or Asian, or other 'exotic' ways of understanding.
African American children are significantly more likely to be obese than are white children. Nearly half of African American children will develop diabetes at some point in their lives. People, that's half of our children. ...We can build our kids the best schools on earth, but if they don't have the basic nutrition they need to concentrate, they're still going to have a challenge learning.
My sister is Korean and my parents adopted her about three years before I was born and that is how I grew up.
My mother is a realist, and she's had biological and adoptive children, and she said it's no different: No matter what, they're putting a stranger into your arms. You don't know them yet.
Cindy and I are adoptive parents. We know what a treasure and joy it is to have an adopted child in our lives.
My father's best friend, Georgie Terra, was an Italian guy. The children and the cousins and nieces and nephews were children of the Mafia. Those were the children he grew up with. If you want to go to a safe neighborhood, go to where the Mafia is.
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.
I'm a kid who grew up in an all African-American neighborhood and got into schools and aspired to just be me, and didn't worry about labels or anything. Just wanted to be a success at what I did.
Her parents, Austin Taylor and Kathleen Taylor, were big deals in Vancouver - they were civic leaders, and he raced horses in the Kentucky Derby - and my mother grew up a debutante. And when she and my dad were married, there were about a thousand guests at that reception.
I grew up in a house that was the traditional African-American home that was dominated by a matriarch, and that matriarch was my grandmother. She was tough. She was strong. She was powerful.
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