A Quote by Petina Gappah
I was one of the first six black kids to integrate a formerly all-white school. I remember being looked at all the time and people laughing at my hair. I was also very self-conscious about the food I had for lunch. I had egg sandwiches, and the other mothers gave kids fancy stuff like bologna and Marmite. It took about a year to settle in.
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I was embarrassed about being Indian and I was very introverted. My mom would pack me Indian food for lunch. All the kids had their Lunchables and peanut butter and jelly sandwiches and I had rice and dal. They would say, 'Does your house smell like curry? You smell like curry!' So, I'd never eat lunch, really. Or, I'd hide to eat lunch.
I used to be so angry about the kids that had stuff. Like the kids that had cars, the kids that had money to go get lunch every day off campus. I used to feel so slighted.
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.
But when you talk about the education and you talk about the lack of recreation for kids to do, I mean, it's second to none in New Orleans when you talk about the lack of opportunities for young people. And it's not just black kids, it's white kids. It's Asian kids. I had Vietnamese kids in my class that had lack of opportunities.
I realize that I'm black, but I like to be viewed as a person, and that's everybody's wish... I try to be a role model for black kids, white kids, yellow kids, green kids. This is what I felt was good about my personality.
I know black kids who don't even know any other black kids except their cousins. And that's enough. You wouldn't look at these kids and say that they are Uncle Toms or self-hating or fleeing or trying to be white, given the culture in which they live, which is very natural to them as kids.
Once my school was integrated, and I was there with white kids and a few black kids, it really didn't matter to us what we looked like.
Kids love food. It's about putting materials out there that get kids thinking about food - to get kids interacting about food. It's about simple things, like kids thinking about pasta - getting kids to work with food.
I talk about the food issue, I'm really coming at it from pre-White House times, when I was a working mother with a busy husband, a very demanding job and two little kids to feed.... I had to learn what it means to feed and care for your kids in a country where fast food is abundant, where time is a rarity, where eating out is a trend, because families are so busy.... Yes, I'm First Lady, but I know the struggles.
Kids in Washington every year have the big Easter egg roll on the White House lawn. The kids found 300 Easter eggs. They also found about 10,000 missing Hillary emails.
When I first started, everything happened at once. I became religious, my musical career took off, I got married, I had kids, and all that happened within the course of a year. I had an excitement about this newly found faith, and so I was writing about that in a very evident kind of way.
I was so shy. Instead of waiting in line with other kids at lunch, I'd go to a corner and buy a pretzel and orange juice. I think I had that for lunch the first three years of high school.
Me and my family, we sort of had this plan to... once we had kids, we had a plan that about every six years we'd move to a new country. So, when we had kids, we moved to Bali for six years, then we went to Australia for six years.
People would call me Bruce Lee or Jackie Chan or whatever popular martial artist there was at that time. I also remember the other kids at the lunch table freaking out when I brought in Korean food.
I've had a black guy call me a honky, and I've also been told that white people smell like bologna.
I was accepted to multiple fashion schools. But I had two kids when I was a teenager. My kids' mom already had two kids when she was still in high school. So I had to be in the streets early. Instead of going to fashion school, I took the street route.
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