Whoopi Goldberg’s Dyslexia: How It Became Her Advantage
Whoopi Goldberg is an actor, comedian and author. She is one of the few people ever to win an Emmy, a Grammy, an Oscar and a Tony. Her Oscar came for the movie Ghost.
She is also dyslexic, and for most of her childhood nobody knew it. Not her teachers, and not Whoopi herself.
What she did have was a sharp memory, a big imagination and a mother who refused to believe she was slow.
School and the hard part
The early grades went fine. Goldberg has said those years were mostly learning by rote, and her memory was strong enough to carry her.
Then the reading and writing got harder, and she fell behind. Teachers decided she was lazy and put her in the slow class. She heard words like dumb and stupid.
She kept falling further back, and in the end she dropped out of school. She has talked about how deep a word like stupid can cut, even many years later.
When she found out
Goldberg was not diagnosed with dyslexia until she was an adult. When she was growing up, people around her did not have that word. They just called a kid slow.
Her mother saw it differently. She was a nurse who later became a Head Start teacher, and she could tell her daughter was bright because of that memory. Goldberg has said her mother told her she was not slow, just different.
After Goldberg left school, her mother kept her learning anyway. She paid for trips to museums and lectures, so the learning never stopped. It just stopped coming from a page.
Whoopi Goldberg’s dyslexic advantage
Goldberg talked about all this in 2016, at a public conversation hosted by the Child Mind Institute. She was honest that dyslexia can make her a bit slower, because some things take her a minute to work out.
She also said she thinks it made her more thoughtful.
“I think perhaps it made me more introspective.”
Whoopi Goldberg, Child Mind Institute conversation, 2016
Her imagination showed up early. Story time was her favorite part of school, because she could picture every story clearly in her head. That is a handy skill for someone who would later make a living by becoming other people.
Her memory still does the heavy lifting. She has said she learns best when someone reads the script to her. She listens, and that is how the lines go in.
She found her own way to write books too. She speaks them out loud, then works with an editor to shape the words. She is the author of several books, so the method clearly works.
Her break in film came when Steven Spielberg saw her stage show and cast her in The Color Purple. That role brought her a Golden Globe and her first Oscar nomination.
She gives teachers a lot of credit as well. And she warns parents to be careful with hurtful words around their kids.
What we take from it
We like that she never fixed her reading to fit the job. She changed how the job got done. Scripts by ear, books by voice, awards by the shelf.
We also think her mother got it right in four words. Not slow, just different.
Sources
- Whoopi Goldberg Speaks Up About Dyslexia at Annual Adam Katz Memorial Conversation, Child Mind Institute
- Whoopi Goldberg, Academy Award Winning Actress, Yale Center for Dyslexia and Creativity
- Celebrity Quotes: Learning From Challenges, Understood.org
- Quinn Bradlee Talks Dyslexia With Whoopi Goldberg, Quinn Bradlee on Substack