Title: Crossing the color line
First published: 1994
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.
Subjects: Parent and child, Case studies, Racism, Racially mixed children, Race Relations, Parent-Child Relations, Family, Kind, Prejudice, Interrassische Ehe, Rassenfrage, Interracial marriage, Race, Parenting
Places: United States
LC classification: HQ777.9 .R43 1994