Growing up on our estate, we were all different colours, but we were all really poor. I never really realised that black was a problem for some people.
Interpretation
The quote reflects on the innocence of childhood regarding race and poverty.
Michaela Coel's quote captures the essence of childhood naivety, where differences in skin color are often overshadowed by shared experiences of hardship. Growing up in a diverse yet impoverished environment, she suggests that social constructs of race did not affect her perception of others until later in life, highlighting how societal issues can taint our understanding of unity and diversity.
In practice
During a panel on race relations, this quote can be used to illustrate how childhood innocence can lead to a more unified perspective.
In Britain, we need to start presenting the option of being a writer in front of black women. We need to present the idea of being a writer into poorer communities because the majority of black people in this country are working class. We need to let working-class people know that their voices are important.
I don't believe in comedy as a TV genre - I think there's drama that is funny. Because beyond the laughs, there has to be cost, and there has to be heart.
I wanted to write a show about an estate that wasn't sad or morbid, like a lot of shows portray working class life to be.
When you've got African parents, you go to uni, do finance, and go into accounting. But I'm not good with systems. I dropped out in my final year of college to become a Christian poet. Then went back to do my A-levels and went to uni in Birmingham to do political science and theology. I lasted 12 weeks.
We live in a world where if you're white, an upper-class male of extreme privilege, and able-bodied, and you're nothing that takes you away from that norm, then you're going to have - then the world will not assign you problems because of what you are. That is actually the world we live in.
Where I grew up, in Aldgate, east London, one of the poorest boroughs in the country, I saw lots that was real - the bankers with their briefcases, the man next door with five wives, the illegal immigrants in Flat 5. I'm from a world you rarely see on screen, and I want to show it off.
At the moment you are most in awe of all there is about life that you don't understand, you are closer to understanding it all than at any other time.
If my devils are to leave me, I'm afraid my angels will take flight as well.
It is a general rule of human nature that people despise those who treat them well, and look up to those who make no concessions.
So few humans seem to fully exist themselves that I wonder if all this endless speculation and haggling about God is really an exploration of a more interesting and embarrassing question about ourselves.
The past is not simply the past, but a prism through which the subject filters his own changing self-image.
What is the cat?" he exclaimed. "It is a corrective. God, having made the mouse, said, 'I've made a blunder.' And he made the cat. The cat is the erratum of the mouse. The mouse, plus the cat, Is the revised and corrected proof of creation.
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