Last week, I was asked, along with four other bloggers, to take part in a phone interview with Taye Diggs about his new children’s book called Chocolate Me!

Before we dig into the interview, let’s take a quick look at what Taye’s new book is all about:

Chocolate Me! is a children’s book based on Taye Diggs’ experiences of feeling different and trying to fit in as a kid. Originally written in college as a poem about his difficulties understanding his looks and differences as a child, Chocolate Me! was transformed into a children’s book after teaming up with longtime friend, illustrator, Shane Evans.  According to Taye Diggs, Chocolate Me! is a book about “Self-esteem, self awareness and self-love.” 

Here are some highlights from the interview:

* Taye on his struggles as a child to understand race and how he fit in:

“There was that bout , my bout with my struggle at that time as a 5 year old, just understanding the nature of race as far as white people and black people are concerned or black people and black people are concerned. Right about that time when I was 5, after that conversation I had with my mother, that kind of sustained me because things remained fairly simple until, it was around 5^th grade, because we moved a bunch of different places. And then later, we moved back into another suburb where the neighborhood was very diverse, but my grade was not. It was an interesting kind of contradiction, where the suburb we moved to was when I was first introduced to upper-middle class black people, but I was the only black person in my class. So there were still issues. I remember there was one black girl and me and whenever people would pair off, they would immediately just assume that we would partner. They weren’t very liberal with their thinking, the teacher included. When I got into high school I started to hear, just from the black community, “oh everybody is more attracted to the light skin girls and the light skin dudes and the light eyes.” And from within the race the light skin black people and more lighter brown people would make fun of the darker people. So then it was a completely different kind of struggle. And then funnily enough it was when dark skinned men, and this was just from my perspective, there seemed to be a shift where all of a sudden we saw Denzel Washington, Wesley Snipes, Tyson Beckford. For me personally, when I saw Tyson Beckford kind of haled as this beautiful man by all people, that caused a shift in my being. And I remember literally waking up and walking the streets feeling a little bit more proud.”

* Taye on why he wrote Chocolate Me!:

“The idea to write this book came far before I was a father. I knew that I wanted to be a father, but that had no influence on the actual writing of the book. The inspiration came straight from more of an experience of being a son… my mother’s son. That being said, once we got pregnant, my perspective completely transformed and though the words didn’t change, though the message didn’t change, how I felt about what I was writing changed and I just started to get really excited for the day

1 Comments on An interview with Taye Diggs about his new book, “Chocolate Me”, last added: 1/23/2012

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Eric Van Raepenbusch said, on 1/18/2012 4:48:00 AM

Can’t wait to read more next week! Nice work Chris!

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