Courtney A. Kemp Quotes

I was black growing up in an all-white neighborhood, so I felt like I just didn't fit in. Like I wasn't as good as everybody else, or as smart, or whatever.

When I was growing up, I always felt a bit like I didn't quite fit in, a feeling that perhaps still lingers in the background to this very day. I was the small brown girl in the big white suburb.

And I was the only black kid in my school for almost all of my childhood, until I was a teenager. So imagine, if you will, being 6 feet tall by third grade, so essentially being a living maypole.

I'm Asian-American, and I was the only Chinese girl growing up in a white school in San Diego. So I understood what it was like to be different, to always want to fit in and never feel like you ever could.

I was one of the only people of color at my grade school and also my high school. It's weird recollecting on my childhood, I think, because my brothers are all white. We all share the same father but different mothers. I guess I kind of associated white, but I was occasionally reminded in a really negative way that I wasn't.

I hated, when I was a kid, being told that 'Black people don't do that.' And the white kids at school didn't accept me because I was black, and the black kids in my neighborhood didn't accept me because they thought I thought I was white.

I grew up basically in a predominantly, you know, white community and I was mixed but as a kid you don't know that. So I was always different, always stood out and people would always make fun of me.

From about the age of 5, I was aware that I didn't fit. I was the black, atheist kid in the all-white, Catholic school run by nuns. I was an anomaly.

Obama reminds me of the black kid at a white school that don't nobody want to play with.

I never identified with anybody. I have always been very sensitive about my color, because everybody called me 'yellow gal.' I was caught in between both sides - nobody wanted me. I love that my audience is there, but I always feel as though I have to fend for myself.

I was a WASP kid going to a high school that was 99 percent Jewish and I wanted attention and I wanted to make a spectacle of myself because I couldn't stand to be ignored.

I was at all-white schools from kindergarten to twelfth grade, so I wanted to feel what it was like just to be me and not, like, Black Amy.

Black folk who don't realize I'm mixed will treat me like I'm some racist person, or when white people find out I'm black, they treat me with racism, and I don't feel like I belong or fit in anywhere.

Being someone that grew up in a biracial household I never really felt accepted by black people when I was a little kid, I didn't feel fully accepted by black kids and I definitely didn't feel fully accepted by white kids cause I just felt like I could never be neither one.

As early as second grade I remember feeling really different and isolated. I had the hugest crush on a boy, and my best friend had a crush on him, too. One day he said to me, 'I like your best friend more because she's paler and she has freckles.' And it was right then that I began to feel like, Oh wow, I'm different.

I never got to go to prom. I never went to regular school. I ate lunch by myself.

I knew I was different when I was about six years of age but I just knew that I wasn't like everybody else. I mean I wasn't like the other kids. I didn't know what that was. But I guess it was when I was in seventh or eighth grade, I'm like, 'Hey, something's wrong here.'

I never fit in. Everyone knew my dad was Indian. I was half-Indian.

I think that it's hard enough being an adolescent and wanting so much to fit in with your peers, your schoolmates, and to erase any sign of difference, to be part of the group. And being biracial but also being black in a predominately white school marked me as different.

I cried to my mother that I wanted to go to Hebrew school; I wanted Jewish friends. But when my mother took me, the kids there all knew each other, and somehow I was even more of an outcast.

I was looked at as weird, odd, not fitting in with the Hollywood crowd.

I was bred as an outcast, part Negro and part Seminole, in my early years raised as an Indian.

Growing up as an Asian American in this society, there were a lot of times where you feel isolated or out of place as an Asian. And growing up in White America, that's absolutely my experience. And I think that's why I got into acting because I wanted to be anybody else but Asian.

There are still some black youth growing up in ghettoes in this country who will never know a white person—not even speak to one.

My identity, I felt, was so distinct. I felt very much like an outsider. My family didn't have the same rituals that everyone else seemed to have.