White Girl
A Story of School Desegregation
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- £9.99
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- £9.99
Publisher Description
One woman’s memoir of coming of age while being bused to largely black schools after a Virginia legal battle forced integration in the 1970s.
This poignant account recalls firsthand the upheaval surrounding court-ordered busing in the early 1970s to achieve school integration. As a white student sent to predominantly black schools in Richmond, Virginia, Clara Silverstein tells a story that pulls us into the forefront of this great social experiment. At school, she dealt daily with the unintended, unforeseen consequences of busing as she also negotiated the typical passions and concerns of young adulthood—all with little direction from her elders, who seemed just as bewildered by the changes around them. Inspired by her parents’ ideals, Silverstein remained in the public schools despite the emotional stakes. Her achingly honest story, woven with historical details, confronts us with powerful questions about race and the use of our schools to engineer social change.
“At once a vivid description of a controversial social experiment, an intimate chronicle of a girl’s turbulent journey through adolescence, and a loving tribute to a visionary father who died too young.”—James S. Hirsch, author of Two Souls Indivisible
“In White Girl, Clara Silverstein has written an honest, balanced, and deeply personal memoir. With lively prose she describes what it felt like to be perceived as “the enemy” and explains all the inherent contradictions in her own coming of age.”—Robert Pratt, author of We Shall Not Be Moved: The Desegregation of the University of Georgia
“It’s easy to feel Silverstein’s anguish, but her message is that positive social change is possible.”—Library Journal
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Silverstein set out to tell a story about being the unlikely minority in a politically charged time. In some ways, she succeeds. Her memoir is a delicately told, detailed account of the humiliation she experienced as one of 10 white students in an otherwise all-black junior high school in the early 1970s in Richmond, Va. As if dealing with puberty and her own father's untimely death weren't enough, Silverstein was laughed at and shut down repeatedly, becoming, in effect, a desegregation martyr. Her educational experience highlights the inevitable growing pains that accompany any lofty political idealism. Importantly, Silverstein reveals that it wasn't just the black kids and families who suffered as the buses rolled. Unfortunately, while Silverstein readily retells her painful childhood one small moment at a time, she fails to get at the brutal truth of how this has affected the rest of her life. She hints at it when she admits, "No matter how I look or where I move, there is no escape from my past. My experiences are lodged inside me like splinters of glass." Yet she neglects to explore how the same painful minutiae played out in her later life as a result of those struggles so many years ago.
