White Girl: A Story of School Desegregation

WHITE GIRL: A Story of School Desegregation is a stirring and poignant account of the upheaval surrounding court-ordered busing in the early 1970s. Like many students at the vanguard of this inevitable movement to achieve school integration, sixth-grader Clara Silverstein faced humiliation on a daily basis. She was spit on, tripped, and shoved by her new schoolmates. This was a typical reaction to the majority of the Black (the term of that era), children who were subject to this law. But this fast-paced memoir inverts our understanding of desegregation. Clara was white, one of the few white students in her entire school. This is her story, a vivid description of a controversial social experiment and an intimate chronicle of a young girl's turbulent journey through adolescence. Clara lived in Chicago and was very familiar with racial mixing. But when the family relocated to Richmond, Virginia, after the death of her father, her racial education escalated. She wonders how she lived through several agitated situations: her first crush on a Black classmate, naively wearing a jacket with a Confederate flag sewn on to class, and surviving alone, when the other white classmates switched to private schools. Clara remained in the public schools and contends that if she learned nothing else, she did come to understand the scourge of racism. Her story is one that is usually lost in the historical accounts of busing, and this fact motivated her to share her experience. Her story is woven with in-depth historical details and several personal photographs. Some thirty years later there are those who question the use of the school system to create social change. This is a different view of this racially motivated issue. Reviewed by aNN of The RAWSISTAZ Reviewers