Neneh Cherry Quotes

Throughout most of my life, I've tried to downplay my Chinese heritage because I wanted so much to be an American. I was the only Asian kid in my elementary school, and I longed to be like everyone else. I insisted on American food; I was embarrassed by my mother's poor English.

I think when I first straightened my hair, I was a teenager. I don't believe that I was consciously doing it to look white or to be on television. It never crossed my mind. All of the girls in my neighborhood got perms and their hair straightened. But I know that historically it was to assimilate and there are some people who do it for that reason.

When I was at school, you had to choose; there was a lot of pressure to assimilate. You were an Aussie, or you were one of 'the wogs' - which was everybody else. But I didn't want to be in either group, so I felt like an odd one out.

Sometimes, growing up, I tried to be very Latina; I would change my voice... experiment with my hair a lot, trying to figure out who I was in a primarily white school.

We have a lot of black Anglo-Saxons. Their skin is black, but their brain is white. When I get real mad at them, I call them 'graham crackers.'

So many white kids, English kids - we had no culture.

I identified with white culture, and I wanted to fit in. I didn't identify with black culture. Like, I didn't like Tyler Perry movies, and I wasn't into hip-hop music. I liked Neil Young.

There is an imagined thing called black culture. But culture is a construction. It is learned behavior, not innate. The black American experience is the American experience.

I never had to battle for my identity.

You can try to justify how Asian you are, but you're never going to make everybody happy.

I was Persian-American, but I hated bringing Persian food to school. I just didn't want to stand out in that way. I wanted to be like everybody else.

I tried to do Kwanzaa with my family and was like, 'This sucks. What am I doing this for?' For me, I felt like I was doing it because I was trying to live up to someone else's idea of what 'black' was.

I remember distinctly not seeing myself. I didn't see myself in black culture, white culture, mass culture.

There was always a struggle with being Asian and not being Asian enough. It's going to be down to me to own my race.

So in Jamaica it is the aim of everybody to talk English, act English and look English. And that last specification is where the greatest difficulties arise. It is not so difficult to put a coat of European culture over African culture, but it is next to impossible to lay a European face over an African face in the same generation.

If the American Negro is to have a culture of his own he will have to leave America to get it.

Michael [Jackson] reconstructed his face and deconstructed the African features into a spooky European geography of fleshly possibilities, and yet what we couldn't deny, that even as his face got whiter and whiter his music got Blacker and Blacker. His soul got more deeply rooted in the existential agony and the profound social grief that Black people are heir to.

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.

I mean, a Mexican boy couldn't be anything else but an Indian. And why did you take the name of Quinn, they used to say to me. Hey, you're an Indian, so I played Indians.

After all, we are not French and never can be, and any attempt to be so is to deny our inheritance and to try to impose upon ourselves a character that can be nothing but a veneer upon the surface.

I was made fun of in the Midwest - I was the only Asian in my graduating class of 200. Fortunately, I found my niche, and it was fine. But I wanted to be so white, you wouldn't believe it. I was like, 'I want to be white; I don't want to be this anymore.' But now I embrace it.

People look at me, and they don't see what they think is a typical Aboriginal. I always thought I'd be the white person in a black play.

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.

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.

It didn't matter that I wore clothes from Sears; I was still different. I looked different. My name was different. I wanted to pull away from the things that marked my parents as being different.