Skin Deep: Black Women & White Women Write About Race - Softcover

Golden, Marita; Shreve, Susan

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0385474105 ISBN 13: 9780385474108

Publisher: Anchor, 1996

Synopsis

Candid, poignant, provocative, and informative, the essays and stories in Skin Deep explore a wide spectrum of racial issues between black and white women, from self-identity and competition to childrearing and friendship. Eudora Welty contributes a bittersweet story of a one-hundred-year-old black woman whose spirit is as determined and strong as anything in nature. Bestselling author Naomi Wolf recalls her first exposure to racism growing up, examining the subtle forms it can take even among well-meaning people; bell hooks writes about the intersection between black women and feminist politics; and Joyce Carol Oates includes a one-act play in which racial stereotypes are reversed. Among the other writers featured in the collection are Toni Morrison, Alice Walker, Susan Straight, Mary Morris, and Beverly Lowry. A groundbreaking anthology that reveals surprising insights and hidden truths to a subject too often clouded by misperceptions and easy assumptions,  Skin Deep is a major contribution to understanding our culture.

About this title

About the Author

Marita Golden is the author of more than a dozen works of fiction and nonfiction. Her books include After, Migrations of the Heart, Saving Our Sons, and Don’t Play in the Sun. She is the founder of the Hurston/Wright Foundation, an organization that supports African American writers. She lives in Mitchellville, Maryland.

Susan Shreve is the author of several acclaimed books for young adults and children, including three books about Amanda’s younger brother—Joshua T. Bates.

From Booklist

Girlfriend, you don't want to miss the pungent, probing questions and answers in this fascinating, timely volume. Four of Skin Deep's 20 pieces have previously appeared elsewhere: Eudora Welty's "A Worn Path," Alice Walker's "The Revenge of Hannah Kemhuff," Toni Morrison's "Recitatif," and Joyce Carol Oates' "Negative." Like these more famous writers, the authors of the collection's new material--Lisa Page, Naomi Wolff, Retha Powers, Beverly Lowry, Patricia Browning Griffith, Mary Morris, Jewelle Gomez, Ann Filemyr, Susan Straight, Catherine Clinton, Dorothy Gilliam, bell hooks, social workers Cathleen Gray and Shirley Bryant, and both editors--are brave, disconcerting, moving, funny, and challenging as they struggle to gaze squarely at the ways American women have penetrated--and failed to penetrate--the multifarious barriers of race. This is scary territory: a landscape littered with betrayals and failures of understanding, but illuminated by precious victories and by the editors' hope that we can "both see and see beyond race," that if we "address our differences . . . [now], the issue of race in our children's generation will be, in fact, skin deep." Mary Carroll

Edition details

• Publisher: Anchor
• Publication date: 1996
• ISBN 10: 0385474105
• ISBN 13: 9780385474108
• Binding: Paperback
• Language: English
• Number of pages: 320