In high school ethics, they went around and asked what everyone thought their classmates were qualified to do. For me, everyone said actress. But to me it was very much ‘if it happens, it happens.’
My experiences at Princeton have made me far more aware of my ‘blackness’ than ever before. I have found that at Princeton, no matter how liberal and open-minded some of my white professors and classmates try to be toward me, I sometimes feel like a visitor on campus; as if I really don’t belong.
My sense of my own superiority over many of my classmates would have been much more muted if I knew that they had seen me failing miserably at woodwork or cross-stitch.
I actually went to law school with Jim Comey. We were in the same class, and he was respected by our classmates just like he was respected by the agents that he supervised.
My biggest phobia is spiders. When I was in second grade, one of my classmates got bitten. That did it for me.
My mother would organize huge parties for my elementary school classmates. To prepare, she would go back to the bakery in her old neighborhood of Inwood and get special shamrock cookies. Hawaiian Punch was served and we had shamrock napkins. It was a lot of fun.
When I look back at where I came from, at the school I attended… my classmates for the most part haven’t had successful paths – many have had a difficult, chaotic path.
People often ask me why I continue to speak out if it’s hurting my family. But that’s exactly why I speak out. The people Erdogan is targeting are my family, my friends, my neighbors, my classmates. I need to speak out, or my country will suffer in silence.
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