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Notes of a White Black Woman
Race, Color, Community
206 pages | 6 x 9 | 1995
ISBN 978-0-271-01430-2 | cloth: $43.95
ISBN 978-0-271-02124-9 | paper: $26.95
“In this powerful collection of life-writing, we see our sister coming home to herself and to us. In doing so, she places the ‘color complex’ squarely on the table. We owe it to her to join the dialogue.” —Patricia Bell-Scott , editor of Life Notes: Personal Writing by Contemporary Black Women
“These stunningly powerful essays call upon experiences utterly personal yet distinctly universal; they examine flawed constructs that have evolved to set people apart from one another—fundamental notions about how a person is supposed to look or act based upon arbitrary groupings. With a goal no less compelling than building what she terms ‘a new kinds of community,’ Scales-Trent proves to be a teacher of remarkable humanity and great clarity of thought.
” —Booklist
“[Judy Scales-Trent] has only two choices. She can accept these crazy definitions and be degraded and marginalized into almost-nothingness, or she can take a look at the narrow margin where she lives and turn it into another set of lines, a river and two shores, or a crossroads where many highways intersect. Scales-Trent hangs out in the margin of things. But she’s taken these margins, these borderlines, and turned them into deep, rich countries of her own.” —Carolyn See, Washington Post
From the book:
" I remember one time in particular, after the cab I was in crashed into the car in front, then backed into the one behind. A policeman stopped to help. As he was taking down my name and address, I noticed that he had checked the 'white' box. 'Officer,' I said politely, 'you made an error on your form. I am not white. I am black.’ He gave me a long, bored look, decided not to discuss it, and said, 'Sure, lady. If you say so.' If I say so? If I say so! As if it were my idea! I was enraged at his assumption that all of this—the categories, the racial purity laws, the lives that are stomped, mangled, ruined because of those categories and those laws was based on my say-so. If I said so, we would do away with all of it the sickness and fear, the need to classify asa way to control, the need to make some appear smaller so that others can appear larger. 'If I say so' indeed."
While the "one-drop rule" in the United States dictates that people with any African ancestry are black, many black Americans have white skin. Notes of a White Black Woman is one woman's attempt to describe what it is like to be a "white" blackwoman and to live simultaneously inside and outside of both white and black communities.
Law professor Judy Scales-Trent begins by describing how our racial purity laws have operated over the past four hundred years. Then,in a series of autobiographical essays, she addresses how race and color interact in relationships between men and women,within families, and in the larger community. Scales-Trentultimatelyexplores the question of what we really mean by "race" inthis country, once it is clear that race is not a tangiblereality as reflected through color.
Scales-Trent uses autobiography both as a way to describe these issues and to develop a theory of the social construction of race. She explores how race and color intertwine through black and white families and across generations; how members of both black and white communities work to control group membership; and what happens to relations between black men and women when thelayer of coloris placed over the already difficult layer of race. She addresses how one can tell--and whether one can tell--who, indeed,is "black" or "white." Scales-Trentalso celebrates the richness of her bicultural heritage andshows how she has revised her teaching methods to provide her law students with a multicultural education.
Judy Scales-Trent teaches at the SUNY-Buffalo School of Law.