The Black Girl Next Door
eBook - ePub

The Black Girl Next Door

A Memoir

  1. 352 pages
  2. English
  3. ePUB (mobile friendly)
  4. Available on iOS & Android
eBook - ePub

The Black Girl Next Door

A Memoir

About this book


A powerful, beautifully written memoir about coming of age as a black girl in an exclusive white suburb in "integrated, " post-Civil Rights California in the 1970s and 1980s. At six years of age, after winning a foot race against a white classmate, Jennifer Baszile was humiliated to hear her classmate explain that black people "have something in their feet to make them run faster than white people." When she asked her teacher about it, it was confirmed as true. The next morning, Jennifer's father accompanied her to school, careful to "assert himself as an informed and concerned parent and not simply a big, black, dangerous man in a first-grade classroom." This was the first of many skirmishes in Jennifer's childhood-long struggle to define herself as "the black girl next door" while living out her parents' dreams. Success for her was being the smartest and achieving the most, with the consequence that much of her girlhood did not seem like her own but more like the "family project." But integration took a toll on everyone in the family when strain in her parents' marriage emerged in her teenage years, and the struggle to be the perfect black family became an unbearable burden. A deeply personal view of a significant period of American social history, The Black Girl Next Door deftly balances childhood experiences with adult observations, creating an illuminating and poignant look at a unique time in our country's history.

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Yes, you can access The Black Girl Next Door by Jennifer Baszile in PDF and/or ePUB format, as well as other popular books in Social Sciences & Social Science Biographies. We have over one million books available in our catalogue for you to explore.

Table of contents

  1. Cover Page
  2. Title Page
  3. Copyright Page
  4. Dedication Page
  5. Chapter One: Running The Race
  6. Chapter Two: Shacks And Moonshine
  7. Chapter Three: The Other One
  8. Chapter Four: Eight Mile Road
  9. Chapter Five: Slavery And Civil Rights
  10. Chapter Six: The Makeover
  11. Chapter Seven: I Don’T Think Of You As Black
  12. Chapter Eight: No Lye
  13. Chapter Nine: The Setup
  14. Chapter Ten: Kentucky Fried Me
  15. Chapter Eleven: My Father’S Daughter
  16. Chapter Twelve: My Summer Of Love
  17. Chapter Thirteen: Separate Lives
  18. Acknowledgments
  19. Touchstone Reading Group Guide