race identity

Rebecca Walker discusses how she dealt with her mixed heritage and remained true to both her African-American and Jewish cultures.

"A meditation on race and identity . . . [Presents] the searching story of one American family's multigenerational transformation from what is called black to what is assumed to be white"--Provided by publisher.

The stunning and provocative coming-of-age memoir about Sarah Valentine's childhood as a white girl in the suburbs of Pittsburgh, and her discovery that her father was a black man. At the age of 27, Sarah Valentine discovered that she was not, in fact, the white girl she had always believed herself to be. She learned the truth of her paternity: that her father was a black man. And she learned the truth about her own identity: mixed race. And so Sarah began the difficult and absorbing journey of changing her identity from white to black. In this memoir, Sarah details the story of the discovery of her identity, how she overcame depression to come to terms with this identity, and, perhaps most importantly, asks: why? Her entire family and community had conspired to maintain her white identity. The supreme discomfort her white family and community felt about addressing issues of race--her race--is a microcosm of race relationships in America. A black woman who lived her formative years identifying as white, Sarah's story is a kind of Rachel Dolezal in reverse, though her 'passing' was less intentional than conspiracy. This memoir is an examination of the cost of being black in America, and how one woman threw off the racial identity she'd grown up with, in order to embrace a new one.

"An African-American writer's concise, heartfelt take on the state of his nation, exploring the war between the values he has always held and the reality with which he is confronted in twenty-first-century America.

James McBride shares the story of his mother's life and complicated racial identity which he only learned after becoming an adult. He tells of her infancy in Poland as the daughter of an Orthodox Jewish rabbi, her childhood in small-town Virginia, her move to Harlem at the age of eighteen, her marriage to an African-American man, her achievements as a wife and mother to twelve children, and her refusal to ever admit she is white.

James McBride chronicles his twelve-year journey to learn about his mother's past, describing her unhappy childhood, marriage, refusal to admit she was white, and creation of an all-black church in Harlem, and shares details of his own life and the challenges he faced coping with his family's secrets.

"[A] collection of essays by black women writers, curated by the founder of the popular book club Well-Read Black Girl, on the importance of recognizing ourselves in literature"--Provided by publisher.

"A white child sees a TV news report of a white police officer shooting and killing a black man. 'In our family, we don't see color,' his mother says, but he sees the colors plain enough. An afternoon in the library's history stacks uncover the truth of white supremacy in America. Racism was not his idea and he refuses to defend it"--OCLC.

A collection of eighteen essays, memoir pieces, and poems addressing race in the United States and written in response to James Baldwin's 1962 "Letter to My Nephew" in which the author lamented that 100 years after the Emancipation Proclamation, it felt like African Americans were celebrating too soon.

"Describes how race shapes the lives of white people, explains what makes racism so hard to see, identifies common white racial patterns, and speaks back to popular narratives that work to deny racism"--Back cover.