Jodie Turner-Smith Quotes

The thing about being black and having a different accent, in the beginning, is that it makes you foreign.

As I got older, I realised that people saw me as other things - sometimes Korean, sometimes Japanese, sometimes just Asian. When my family moved to a more affluent white neighbourhood, I started to see myself as 'other', this amorphous category. I didn't even know what 'not other' was, but I knew I wasn't it; I wasn't what was normal.

When I got to Florida, I was a British kid, but I was also an Indian kid: a brown kid with an English accent. Talk about being an outsider. And that's become the theme of a lot of the stuff I write about.

If my accent betrayed my foreign birth, it also stamped me as an enemy, in the imagination of the producers.

In Trinidad, where as new arrivals we were a disadvantaged community, that excluding idea was a kind of protection; it enabled us - for the time being, and only for the time being - to live in our own way and according to our own rules, to live in our own fading India.

Foreigners are not like the people I am used to here.

I always feel like people misunderstand the difference between an Asian story and an Asian-American story. That's completely different, too. I have friends who grew up in Asia, and our experiences are so different. Even though we might look the same, I feel like being Asian and then being Asian-American is completely different.

I was raised in Nigeria, and my mother is white, but I never saw her as white, not until I came to America. She was just my mother. She didn't really have a color.

Just because I don't speak English with an accent anymore doesn't mean that I'm better than the people who do.

I grew up with the idea that someone might hate you if they knew what religion you were; being afraid to open my mouth because my accent might make people think something about me. Or even if they didn't, would they understand me?

Asian-Americans are still regarded as 'other' by many of their fellow-citizens.

Growing up, I was constantly labeled an 'oreo' by my black peers because of my proper speech and 'valley girl accent.'

Because of my Asian-ness, I couldn't be anonymous - what I said, what I ate, what I did at the weekend were startlingly different to what everyone else did. I was also a performer, quick and chameleon-like, good at accents, so that made me stand out.

Try and fit in in a New Zealand playground with an Armagh accent - it doesn't work.

I'm three quarters Scottish, but I sound English. I don't really see British as a race.

As a black woman who grows up in a predominantly white neighborhood, you learn how to perform a 'good' version of yourself. And then when you're with your home girls, you're saying all kinds of stuff that sounds all kinds of crazy, but you understand each other because you're speaking the way that you're comfortable with.

I'm sure I went through a stage when I resented being Indian because in every other manner, in terms of cultural reference points and vocabulary and all the rest of it, I was way ahead of everybody else - so the one thing that set me back was being Indian. And I couldn't do anything about it.

I feel like my life experience is that of an outsider. Let me explain: my parents are from Panama, and they moved to the United States the year after I was born. They moved into an all-white neighborhood, where the previous black family had a cross burned on their lawn.

My mum made a conscious decision not to teach me any Indian languages so I wouldn't talk with an accent.

I made some flippant remark about not wanting my son to grow up with an American accent, and the next thing I knew, there were people in America suggesting I head back to Britain if I was unhappy at such a prospect.

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

I always identified myself as non-Swedish. I was never discriminated against, because I looked Swedish and speak without an accent. But I had an outsider's perspective.

In Paris, one is always reminded of being a foreigner. If you park your car wrong, it is not the fact that it's on the sidewalk that matters, but the fact that you speak with an accent.

I toned down my accent at school; otherwise, people would pick on me.

Don Cornelius gave me an incredulous look regarding my accent. I lessened it; he gave a nod of approval. Instantly, I felt ashamed. I had made my first conscious effort not to sound ethnic.