{"id":58862,"date":"2019-09-11T01:09:39","date_gmt":"2019-09-11T01:09:39","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.mixedracestudies.org\/?p=58862"},"modified":"2019-09-11T01:09:39","modified_gmt":"2019-09-11T01:09:39","slug":"black-like-me-a-pittsburgh-natives-memoir-of-racial-identities-lost-and-found","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/?p=58862","title":{"rendered":"Black Like Me: A Pittsburgh native’s memoir of racial identities lost and found"},"content":{"rendered":"

Black Like Me: A Pittsburgh native’s memoir of racial identities lost and found<\/strong><\/em><\/a><\/p>\n

Pittsburgh Post-Gazette<\/a>
\n2019-08-30<\/p>\n

Bill O’Driscoll<\/strong><\/a><\/p>\n

\"Sarah<\/a>
\nSarah Valentine<\/small><\/a><\/p>\n

Of all the racist things people do, living out white privilege might be the most insidious. White privilege is not just the assumptions that get white people treated better by employers and loan officers. It\u2019s also the mental architecture that permits white people to avoid thinking of themselves as \u201cwhite\u201d \u2014 even as whiteness is assumed as the norm, and everyone who lacks it as \u201cother.\u201d White privilege is most potent when it goes unconsidered.<\/p>\n

It will be nearly impossible to avoid considering white privilege after reading \u201cWhen I Was White: A Memoir<\/a>.\u201d Author Sarah Valentine<\/a> is that rare person who has lived both with white privilege and without it, and her account is moving and analytically rigorous.<\/p>\n

Literature has given us light-skinned blacks who \u201cpassed\u201d as white<\/a>, from famed critic Anatole Broyard<\/a> to figures in the poetry of Pittsburgh<\/a>-based poet Toi Derricotte<\/a>. Ms. Valentine\u2019s story is something else again. She was born in 1977, and grew up mostly in the North Hills<\/a>, one of three children in a tightly knit Catholic family. Her parents were white, and so, therefore, was she \u2014 until she learned, at age 27, that her biological father, whom she never knew, was African American…<\/p>\n

Read the entire article here<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Literature has given us light-skinned blacks who \u201cpassed\u201d as white, from famed critic Anatole Broyard to figures in the poetry of Pittsburgh-based poet Toi Derricotte. Ms. Valentine\u2019s story is something else again.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[12,395,5,8,6462,20],"tags":[30240,4889,24133,9457,20378,15629],"class_list":["post-58862","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-articles","category-autobiography","category-book-reviews","category-media-archive","category-passing-2","category-usa","tag-bill-odriscoll","tag-pennsylvania","tag-pittsburgh","tag-pittsburgh-post-gazette","tag-sarah-valentine","tag-the-pittsburgh-post-gazette"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/58862","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=58862"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/58862\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":58864,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/58862\/revisions\/58864"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=58862"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=58862"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=58862"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}