When She Was White
Subtitle: The True Story of a Family Divided by Race
Publisher: Miramax; Miramax Books/Hyperion
Published: April 4, 2007
Language: eng
Format: Hardcover
Number of pages: 324
ISBN-13: 9780786868988
Subjects: Race And Ethnic Relations; People of Color; Biography And Autobiography; Biography & Autobiography; Biography / Autobiography; Biography/Autobiography; Women; Personal Memoirs; Biography & Autobiography / General; Family & Relationships / General; Discrimination & Racism; Biography; Case studies; Colored people (South Africa); Social conditions; South Africa
Description: During the worst years of official racism in South Africa, the story of one young girl came to symbolize the injustice, corruption, and arbitrary nature of apartheid. Born in 1955 to a pro-apartheid white couple, Sandra Laing was officially registered and raised as a white child. But at a school for whites, she was mercilessly persecuted because of her dark skin and frizzy hair. Her parents attributed her appearance to an interracial union far back in family history. Their neighbors, however, thought Mrs. Laing had committed adultery with a black man. The family was shunned. When Sandra was ten, she was reclassified as "coloured." As a teenager, she eloped with a black man, her parents disowned her, and having known only the privileged world of the whites, she chose to begin again in a poor, all-black township, where life was a desperate struggle against a legal system designed to enslave.--From publisher description.