Dwayne Johnson is one of the most well-recognized actors in Hollywood. Having made a name for himself through massively popular projects like Black Adam, The Fast and The Furious franchise, Moana, and the Jumanji films, he has established himself as an incredibly diverse and versatile actor. Outside of his acting career, the star is also largely known for his professional wrestling career, having been one of the most famous wrestlers in WWE and being a role model for many in the audiences.
It is quite odd to consider an actor so actively part of uplifting people of color struggled with his race growing up, confusing people about his ethnicity based on the color of his skin. Although this may seem discriminatory, their reasoning behind this was far from it.
Dwayne Johnson Was Asked About His Race Growing Up
While doing an interview on The Pivot Podcast, Dwayne Johnson, who is half-black, from his father’s side, was asked if he ever got discriminated against based on his race, considering the fact that he does not look like a black person according to his interviewer, Channing Crowder.
“So a lot of my growing up, was in the south, Texas, Georgia, Tennessee, North Carolina, down in Florida. At that time, I was a seventies baby, I was born in the seventies and got a lot of my growing up done in the eighties,” Johnson said during his interview withThe Pivot Podcast
The actor is also half-Polynesian. Replying to this, Johnsons revealed that he did, in fact, face some form of discrimination when it came to the color of his skin. This discrimination came in the form of questions that Johnson would receive about what his ethnicity was.
Dwayne Johnson Was Asked If He Was Black
Elaborating on this, Dwayne Johnson went on to reveal that growing up in the South, he would have quite a lot of people approach him who knew of him and his parents and ask him about what his ethnicity was, questioning if he was Mexican or Black.
“but yeah, so, in those areas, in the world of Westling, again, it was different back then so your wrestling in these small towns, and I’m going to school in these small towns, living in trailer parks, in the deep south and kids are looking at me like ‘what are you? Are you Mexican? Black? something? you look different, you got the afro’ They see my parents so yeah that happened” Johnson went on to say to The Pivot Podcast
The fact that he looked ‘different’ added to this, considering that he has afro hair. Talking more on this, the actor stated that in the places he grew up, it was difficult to find people of a mixed race, with a majority of the people being either Caucasian or Black, making these questions come from a place of pure curiosity.
Source: The Pivot Podcast
