Boris Kodjoe may be eternally fine, but his experiences as a visibly Black biracial child were anything but. In a sit-down on the Pivot podcast, the actor opened up about his difficult upbringing in Germany.
In response to a question about what his experience was like being raised by his white mother in a predominantly white country, Kodjoe gave a vulnerable and honest answer.
“There’s ignorance and misinformation and fear,” he said. “Because that’s really where it comes from. I was faced with racism and bullies every single day growing up in Germany because I was different. Kids reaching out grabbing my hair, rubbing your skin to see if it’s real, asking if we live on trees in Africa. Just the most ignorant, dumb things based on, again, misinformation and fear.”
He continued,
“On top of it, my mother’s white. My father’s from Ghana. But my dad left when I was between three and four years old. So, it was just my mom and me and my brother. So, I always felt different and you know when you’re a child, all you want is to be just like everybody else. You want to belong. You want to fit in. And without my father there, it made it so much harder because I didn’t have anybody to relate to. I didn’t have somebody to protect me. I didn’t have somebody to explain to me what this was. I think my mother did an extremely admirable job in putting a sense of pride and a sense of confidence in us.”
He also chatted about how he felt when his father abandoned their family and how it shaped his approach to both manhood and parenting.
“When I was in first grade, in maybe kindergarten, they tell you to paint a picture of what you want to be when you get old and become an adult,” he said. “Everybody wanted to be firefighters and athletes, I wrote down I wanted to be a father. So, that was my goal. I didn’t have one present and I knew what it felt like to be disappointed and to feel abandoned.”
He continued,
“When my father left, he told me ‘take care of your mother and your brother’, I was five years old and I took that to heart. And it f***ed me up for 30 years because I thought if I do a good job, he’ll come back. And he never came back. So, I thought, ‘oh, this is my fault, I didn’t do a good job.’ I carried that with me for a long time. So, all of that had a huge impact on me as a father because I knew how important it was to be present for the kids at all time and I wanted them to feel safe. I wanted them to feel loved. I wanted them to feel validated. I wanted them to feel empowered. Thankfully, we got a second chance with my dad because my daughter had these issues and he was a doctor. My mother called him and the next day he showed up to my house in LA.
Kodjoe went on to say that though he hadn’t seen his father since the day he left their family, that he would spend the final 10 years of his life making up for the lost time and forging a relationship with his and Nicole Ari Parker’s children.
Watch the touching episode below:
