I think, as a kid, turning on the television and seeing that everyone seemed to be wealthy and white made me feel like an outsider, lesser than. I was not wealthy. I was not white.
Interpretation
The quote reflects on feelings of alienation and inferiority due to societal representations of wealth and race during childhood.
Jacqueline Woodson expresses a childhood experience where the prevalence of wealthy and white characters in media created a sense of exclusion and inadequacy. This acknowledgment of feeling like an outsider highlights the impact of societal norms and representations on an individual's self-perception, particularly in relation to race and socioeconomic status.
In practice
In a discussion about diversity in media representation.
'Brown Girl Dreaming' was a book I had a lot of doubts about - mainly, would this story be meaningful to anyone besides me? My editor, Nancy Paulsen, kept assuring me, but there were moments when I was in a really sad place with the story for so many reasons. It wasn't an easy book to write - emotionally, physically, or creatively.
In the midst of observing the world and coming to consciousness, I was becoming a writer, and what I wanted to put on the page were the stories of people who looked like me.
Sometimes you do have to laugh to keep from crying. And sometimes the world feels all right and good and kind of like it's becoming nice again around you. And you realize it, and realize how happy you are in it, and you just gotta laugh.
I don't want anyone to walk through the world feeling invisible ever again.
The strength of my mother is something I didn't pay attention to for so long. Here she was, this single mom, who was part of the Great Migration, who was part of a Jim Crow south, who said, 'I'm getting my kids out of here. I'm creating opportunities for these young people by any means necessary.'
I would have written 'Brown Girl Dreaming' if no one had ever wanted to buy it, if it went nowhere but inside a desk drawer that my own children pulled out one day to find a tool for survival, a symbol of how strong we are and how much we've come through.
My hats did give me an identity. In fact, if I had a dollar for every time someone has seen me bareheaded and said, 'I almost didn't recognize you without a hat on', I could have bought the Cowboys myself.
Growing up, I knew I was different. But I didn't know what it meant to be Aboriginal. I just knew that I had a really big, extended family. I was taught nothing about who we were or where we came from.
The mark of a Scot of all classes [is that] he ... remembers and cherishes the memory of his forebears, good or bad; and there burns alive in him a sense of identity with the dead even to the twentieth generation.
I'm Colombian and nothing will change that.
Even though I'm a hairdresser and I love doing hair, I feel like I don't look like a groomer. When I think of how a groomer would look in relation to the first version of 'Queer Eye,' I feel like I don't fit in that box.
There is something missing in Asian America. They're missing people to tell them, 'It's okay to be who you are - you belong. Just be unapologetically you; you're not less than anybody else.'
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