Issa Rae Quotes

I do remember being teased by my cousins on my mom's side for not being black enough. And then I'd spend the summer with my dad and be sent to all white summer camps where I was 'that black girl.'

I am very insecure about my looks, and I always have been because of being mixed race.

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.

As a teenager, my blackness was also questioned by some of the life choices I made that weren't considered to be 'black' choices. For example, joining the swim team when it is a known fact that 'black folk don't swim'; or choosing to become a vegetarian when blacks clearly love chicken.

At Harvard I was taking an African-American studies class, and we were reading about the tragic mulatto. Invariably, the tragic mulatto can't fit in either world and flings herself off a bridge. So I'm reading, and I'm like, 'Oh, my God, I think I'm in literature,' but my life was never like that.

If you're already somebody who's feeling different, you'll do everything in your power to fix it because children will do everything in their power to fit in and assimilate.

When 'Raw Like Sushi' came out in the U.S., I wasn't considered to be black enough. They didn't really know where to put me. The music wasn't 'black black' sounding. It wasn't R&B; it wasn't straight up hip-hop, although obviously in that dimension and world.

I remember feeling all right with myself until age 13. Then, I was getting off the bus one day and this guy called me Miss Piggy. That was the first time I ever really felt like I wasn't okay.

I'm a suspicious mulatto, which means I'm too black to be white and too white to be doing it right.

Middle school was probably my hardest time. I was trying to fit in for so long, until about junior year of high school when I realized that trying to fit into this one image of perfection was never going to make me happy.

Everything about being a teenager and not feeling like you fit in is just magnified by being a mutant!

Whatever that thing is that white people like in blacks, I don't have it. Maybe it's my arrogance or my self-assurance or the way I carry myself, but whatever it is, I don't have it.

I really wasn't heavy in high school. But no one feels right in their own skin, particularly in high school.

For the majority of the time, I may as well have been just a really tan white kid. You know, I may as well have just been, like, a fat kid.

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.

My biggest problem in middle school was catty girls, cliques, and trying to figure out if I wanted to be a part of one of those, just figuring out who I was and all that.

In grammar school some of the girls had problems with me. My face was too light. My hair was too long. It was the black-consciousness period, and I felt really bad.

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 was made fun of a lot in middle school. When I was in seventh grade, the popular kids paid the most popular guy to ask me out.

When I was a teenager, I was super-awkward. I don't think I really felt comfortable in my body or with how I looked, and people were nasty.

I was always told that I acted too white. I was always told that I was going to date a white guy - which, in fairness, was true: I do have a white boyfriend. So they weren't entirely wrong, but all of those things were really damaging.

I've been told that I wasn't Latino enough, which was code for 'street' enough.

I think that, as a black girl, you grow up internalizing all these messages that say you shouldn't accept your hair or your skin tone or your natural features or that you shouldn't have a voice or that you aren't smart.

When I was younger, I went through a phase when I didn't like my hair. Because the school I went to was primarily Caucasian, there wasn't anyone who had my hair texture. I remember one day I straightened my hair, and that was the first day that people gave me compliments on it.

My hair was always frizzy. I always wanted to be blonde with lovely straight hair. I was very skinny. I was quite tomboyish, just very quiet. I always wanted to fit in; I just couldn't.