Backgrounds Quote by Chrissie Hynde

Growing up in the suburbs of Chicago, the color of my skin and my rather peculiar background as an Ethiopian immigrant delineated the border…

— Dinaw Mengestu

I lived in England to learn English. When I went to England for the first time, it was like being on the Moon. I…

— Jean Alesi

Being half-Jamaican, half-Chinese in a very white area, it created a real identity crisis for me as a kid. But I'd travel into London…

— Griff

In the very early days of Wham! the attention felt great, but I do wonder how much freedom I gave away by trying to…

— George Michael

For most of my childhood, I grew up in the countryside of England, where it was very suburban - there weren't a lot of…

— Sonoya Mizuno

My privileged upbringing and education and linguistic fluency gave me such proximity to whiteness that it stung all the more to still find myself…

— Jenny Zhang

I graduated from Bowdoin College and went to the Harvard Graduate School of Education. Then I left and took a job teaching really poor…

— Geoffrey Canada

When I think of my background, if I was privileged on any level, it was in terms of the kind of exposure to experience…

— Edward Norton

When I was going to school, I just wanted to be like everybody else. I would pull at my hair to try and get…

— Neneh Cherry

I was unique in that I was a kind of black that white people could accept. I was their daydream. I had the worst…

— Lena Horne

I could have hidden in Boston and lived at home for three years, gone through my transition, taken voice lessons to make my voice…

— Hari Nef

With my childhood and growing up in a very free place where my parents were artists and always encouraging me to explore, you wouldn't…

— Grace Potter