White Girl

July 19, 2004
Silverstein set out to tell a story about being the unlikely minority in a politically charged time. In some ways, she succeeds. Her memoir is a delicately told, detailed account of the humiliation she experienced as one of 10 white students in an otherwise all-black junior high school in the early 1970s in Richmond, Va. As if dealing with puberty and her own father's untimely death weren't enough, Silverstein was laughed at and shut down repeatedly, becoming, in effect, a desegregation martyr. Her educational experience highlights the inevitable growing pains that accompany any lofty political idealism. Importantly, Silverstein reveals that it wasn't just the black kids and families who suffered as the buses rolled. Unfortunately, while Silverstein readily retells her painful childhood one small moment at a time, she fails to get at the brutal truth of how this has affected the rest of her life. She hints at it when she admits, "No matter how I look or where I move, there is no escape from my past. My experiences are lodged inside me like splinters of glass." Yet she neglects to explore how the same painful minutiae played out in her later life as a result of those struggles so many years ago.

September 1, 2004
Boston Herald editor and writer Silverstein was happily attending an integrated Chicago school in the 1960s when her father's death forced her family to move to Richmond. There she experienced racism firsthand, both as an outsider watching how whites mistreated blacks and as an object of reverse discrimination at school. As a sixth grader and one of the few white students bused to a predominately black school, Silverstein learned to put up with shoves, taunts, and spitting, knowing that complaining would cause more grief. With teachers bewildered by the changes thrust on them and many friends fleeing to private schools, she grew more isolated each year. Silverstein understands why her parents wanted her to live amid racial and social change but wishes someone could have made her school days more tolerable. At times, the book reads like a series of small vignettes but for the most part flows nicely. It's easy to feel Silverstein's anguish, but her message is that positive social change is possible; it's a matter of getting to know people as individuals rather than lumping them into groups. For most public libraries. Terry Christner, Hutchinson P.L., KS

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