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High School Quotes

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High School Quotes

“I was all-state in four sports in New Jersey, but sometimes I couldn't get served at a restaurant two blocks from my high school. There were no job opportunities then... the only thing a black youth could aspire to be was a bellboy or a pullman or an elevator operator, or, maybe, a teacher. There was a time when all we had was black baseball.”

“When I was in high school I made the discovery that if I was playing in a jazz club, and there were black people in the club, if I could get the black people to like what I was doing, I was on the right track. So I began to play to those people because they knew what the authentic music was. I've always had that in the back of my head.”

“When I was in high school, I was in a special math class. I was infatuated with physics, particularly nuclear physics, Einstein, and the Big Bang. I read a lot about black holes. And partly because I'm so lazy I thought you could do all this just by looking at the sky and thinking up universes. It didn't seem like hard work when I was a kid, so I enrolled in this class.”

“I lived in a little working-class town that had no black neighborhoods at all - one high school. We all played together. Everybody was either somebody from the South or an immigrant from East Europe or from Mexico. And there was one church, and there were four elementary schools. And we were all, pretty much until the end of the war, very, very poor.”

“There was a Yale even before Larry [Kramer] and I got there, and there were three designations of students: "white shoe," "brown shoe," and "black shoe." "White shoe" people were kind of the ur-preppies from high-class backgrounds. "Brown shoe" people were kind of the high school student-council presidents who were snatched up and brushed up a little bit to be sent out into the world. "Black shoe" people were beyond the pale. They were chemistry majors and things like that.”

“Imagine if you had genuine, high-quality early-childhood education for every child, and suddenly every black child in America - but also every poor white child or Latino [child], but just stick with every black child in America - is getting a really good education. And they're graduating from high school at the same rates that whites are, and they are going to college at the same rates that whites are, and they are able to afford college at the same rates because the government has universal programs. So now they're all graduating.”

“My Big Mama is my No. 1 financial role model. Much of my advice stems from what she taught me. She never made more than $13,000 a year, yet she paid off her home before she retired. She saved money from every paycheck. She taught me to be skeptical. It makes me cry to think that I'm a nationally syndicated personal finance columnist for one of the world's best newspapers and my core advice comes from my black grandmother who was a nurse's aide with just a high school education.”

“My mom is Jamaican and Chinese, and my dad is Polish and African American, so I'm pretty mixed. My nickname in high school was United Nations. I was fine with it, even though I identify as a black woman. People don't realize it hurts my feelings when someone looks at my hair or my eyes, and says, "But you're not actually black. You're black, but you're not black black, because your eyes are green." I'm like, "What? No, no, I'm definitely black." Even some of my closest friends have said that. It's been a bit touchy for me.”

“I used to tell the story about as a young man in high school one of the professors came in and put a broad white sheet on the board with a dot in the right hand corner and said, "Boys, what do you see?" And we all shouted, a black dot. He stood back and said, "not a single one of you saw the broad white sheet, you all saw the black dot." He went on to tell us to focus on the broader picture, don't focus on the negative.”