Zadie Smith

She thinks she's brilliant.

That's a good thing to be raised around.

She was beautiful.

She was an incredibly beautiful woman.

And all the things that people have said to her, you know, she's very, very dark skinned.

And in Jamaica, the colorism was very intense and she was always called ugly and marga and bucktooth and all the terrible things they said to her.

Somehow she was not destroyed by these things.

And she kind of walked in the world with a lot of confidence.

So maybe that's what my mother taught me, kind of impervious to other people's opinions.

Because you're being stopped from –

Yeah, what was your start point?

In England, at that point, it's hard to get, even when she went to that school, there's a choice between, as they used to put it, secretarial or the academic route.

And as my mum told me, every black girl in that school was told to go the secretarial route.

So that meant no university, no A-levels, you learn to type.

And she types very fast.

But she got her degree later as an adult in her 30s.

So that's a kind of structural discrimination which distorts her entire life.

Colorism, you know, is all over the islands because of the history of slavery and the way those islands were run.

But my mother never, I don't know, somehow she knew she was beautiful and she had confidence in it.

And that's something she always radiated.