Halle Berry has opened up about her experience of being one of the only Black people in her school as a teenager — and how the faculty refused to accept that she was voted prom queen over a white girl.
For reference, Halle’s mom is white, and her dad is Black. Her father walked away from the family when Halle was just four years old, and the star has been open about how being solely raised by a white mom impacted her growing up.
Speaking in the PBS documentary American Masters: How It Feels To Be Free back in 2021, Halle explained that it was “very, very important” for her to find Black role models when she was younger. She added: “I really struggled to find images of Black women or women that I could identify with.”
“I was a Black child being raised by a white woman, so I didn’t have those images in my household,” Halle went on. “Finding them on television and through movies became very, very crucial to me.”
And now, in a new interview with The Cut, Halle recalled moving from a city school with a mostly Black student body to an all-white school in the suburbs when she was in fourth grade. This means that she would have been around nine or 10 years old at the time.
“I had a teacher, Yvonne Sims — she’s still a close friend and the godmother to both of my kids — who was one of the only two Black teachers at the school,” Halle, now 59, began.
Halle explained that this teacher taught her to love her skin and embrace her Black culture, with Halle struggling with not looking like her mom throughout her childhood.
“Every little girl wants to be like her mother, you know? But my mom had blonde hair and blue eyes,” she shared. “I would put a yellow bath towel on my head just to look like her. I struggled.”
But that’s not to say that Halle’s natural beauty went unnoticed by other people, and she was even voted prom queen when she was in high school — seemingly to the disdain of the staff.
“As a Black girl, I was not the symbol of who they wanted for their queen,” Halle told the publication, revealing that the faculty accused her of forging ballot votes. She recalled the teachers forcing her to flip a coin against a white girl to decide who would reign. Halle did not say who won the coin toss.
Acknowledging that she raged over this situation “inwardly,” Halle believes the experience taught her how to confront injustice. She said: “Another thing nobody really gets about me is that I’ve been a fighter my whole life — fighting to be seen for who I really am, fighting to be taken seriously as an artist, fighting the stigma of beauty.”
And this is not the first time that Halle has addressed the misconception surrounding her looks.
Speaking to the New York Times in 2021, Halle shared: “This is another battle I fought my whole life. That because I look a certain way that I’ve been spared any hardship.”
“I’ve had loss and pain and a lot of hurt in my life. I’ve had abuse in my life,” she added at the time. “I get really frustrated when people think because I look a certain way that I haven’t had any of those real-life experiences because I absolutely have.”
“This hasn’t spared me one heartbreak or heartache or fearful or tearful moment,” Halle concluded. “Trust me.”
What do you make of Halle’s comments? Let me know down below!
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