I grew up on the coast of England in the '70s. My dad is white from Cornwall, and my mom is black from Zimbabwe. Even the idea of us as a family was challenging to most people.
Sentiment: NEGATIVE
I come from a mixed background - my mom's black, my dad's white - and I traveled around the world.
My dad was born in Haiti, and my mom was born in Tunisia. She is the daughter of a white French woman and a black, half-Guadeloupian, half-American man. My mom traveled the world a lot. She went through Africa, South America, and the Caribbean. She just got to experience a lot of different cultures, and that came through my childhood.
I grew up in an all-white community.
My dad's family is part British and Austrian, and my mother's family is from Goa, which is in the south of India. I looked different from everyone else, which now is such a blessing. It was harder at the beginning of my career.
My family is part Creole, and we're Indian, and we're also very, very black. My father was so black, he was blue.
All of us are so mixed. My great-grandfather was white.
My family comes from New Zealand, but I'm a London girl. I was born and raised in London, but I've got the blood of a New Zealander, so I always kind of felt like I didn't belong - in a good way.
My family was blue collar, a middle-class kind of thing. My father was born in Detroit, Italian-American. My mother is English. She acted on the stage with Diana Dors. Her parents were French.
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.
I grew up in an environment in Birmingham that was really multicultural, with black kids, Irish kids, Indian kids.