White boy
Subtitle: a memoir
By: Mark D. Naison.
Publisher: Temple University Press
Published: 2002
Place of publication: Philadelphia
Language: eng
Number of pages: 225
Subjects: Naison, Mark, 1946-; Naison, Mark, 1946- -- Relations with African Americans; African Americans -- Study and teaching (Higher) -- New York (State) -- New York -- History -- 20th century; College teachers -- New York (State) -- New York -- Biography; Men, White -- New York (State) -- New York -- Biography; Jews -- New York (State) -- New York -- Biography; Brooklyn (New York, N.Y.) -- Race relations; Brooklyn (New York, N.Y.) -- Biography; New York (N.Y.) -- Race relations; New York (N.Y.) -- Biography
Genres: Biography.
Description: "How does a Jewish boy who spent the bulk of his childhood on the basketball courts of Brooklyn wind up teaching in one of the city's pioneering black studies departments? Naison's odyssey begins as Brooklyn public schools respond to a new wave of Black migrants and Caribbean immigrants, and established residents flee to virtually all-white parts of the city or suburbs.

Already alienated by his parent's stance on race issues and their ambitions for him, he has started on a separate ideological path by the time he enters Columbia College. Once he embarks on a long-term interracial relationship, becomes a member of SDS, focuses his historical work on black activists, and organizes community groups in the Bronx, his immersion in the radical politics of the 1960s has emerged as the center of his life.

Determined to keep his ties to the Black community, even when the New Left splits along racial lines, Naison joined the fledgling African American studies program at Fordham, remarkable then as now for its commitment to interracial education."--BOOK JACKET.