The Black Notebooks: An Interior Journey - Softcover

Derricotte, Toi

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0393319016 ISBN 13: 9780393319019

Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company, 1999

Synopsis

"The Black Notebooks is the most profound document I have read on racism in America today. . . . [It] is not just one of the best books on race I have ever read but just simply one of the best books I have ever read."―Sapphire

The Black Notebooks is one of the most extraordinary and courageous accounts of race in this country, seen through the eyes of a light-skinned black woman and a respected American poet. It challenges all our preconceived notions of what it means to be black or white, and what it means to be human.

About this title

Review:

Realizing that her light skin and "good hair" conspired to give her a unique, unasked-for perspective on the racial divide in the United States, African American poet Toi Derricotte inscribed her anguish in two decades' worth of journal entries. The Black Notebooks records countless moments when Derricotte was showered with offhand entitlements and racist confidences by whites who assumed she, too, was white. She speaks ambivalently of milking such moments, deliberately making end runs around her dark-skinned husband, Bruce, while looking for a home in an all-white suburb or hoping for a decent hotel room. Derricotte talks bluntly, too, of a self-loathing that accompanies being black in America and of not being "black enough." Her honest, angry, painful truth-telling veers into self-absorption and repetition, but perhaps that's fitting: racism hammers away at people in tiny and huge events repeated day after day. Says Derricotte, "My skin causes certain problems continuously, problems that open the issue of racism over and over like a wound."

About the Author:

Toi Derricotte is the author of four collections of poetry. She teaches at the University of Pittsburgh.

About this edition

• Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
• Publication date: 1999
• ISBN 10: 0393319016
• ISBN 13: 9780393319019
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 206