Crossing the color line
Subtitle: race, parenting, and culture
By:  Maureen T. Reddy.
Publisher: Rutgers University Press
Published: 1994
Place of publication: New Brunswick, N.J
Language: eng
Number of pages: 193
Subjects: Racially mixed children -- United States -- Case studies.; Parent and child -- United States.; Racism -- United States.
Description: "Why do white people have vaginas?" asks Maureen Reddy's two-year-old son. "Why do boys have curly hair?" These are the questions Reddy grapples with on her journey, as a white mother of black children, toward an internalized understanding of race - particularly whiteness - and of racism. Moving from memoir to race theory, to literary analysis, to interviews with friends, Reddy places this personal journey in a broad cultural context.

Reddy writes as a racial "insider" who stands outside accepted racial arrangements, a position that can afford unique insight into the many contradictions of those arrangements. She addresses attempts to cross the color line that divides blacks and whites; the meeting points of whiteness and blackness; the politics of feminism and anti-racism; loving blackness; mothering black children; racism in schools; and relationships among black and white women.

Our culture is permeated by color. And whether we can sort out racial divisions will, Reddy feels, determine whether we survive as a society.
Notes: Includes bibliographical references (p. [185]-189) and index.