THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Sunday, August 20, 1995 TAG: 9508180591
SECTION: COMMENTARY PAGE: J3 EDITION: FINAL
TYPE: Book Review
SOURCE: BY RITA DANDRIDGE
LENGTH: Medium: 98 lines
SKIN DEEP
Black Women and White Women Write About Race
EDITED BY MARITA GOLDEN AND SUSAN RICHARDS SHREVE
Doubleday. 309 pp. $22.95.
Skin Deep is an impressive collection of women's fiction, poetry, drama and essays. It explores the contours of race in contemporary relationships between black and white women and examines their friendships, identities and competition.
The editors, one black and the other white, exemplify women's ongoing cross-cultural connections; yet their separate introductions to this volume serve as a metaphor for the race issue that still divides black and white women.
Marita Golden connects the racial reality in America to the difficulty she experienced in securing original works on race for this collection. White women, she says, ``were terrified to broach the subject;'' black women were more forthcoming. Yet both, in different ways, feared the great American dilemma.
Susan Shreve examines the possibilities and impossibilities between the races in a democracy that has failed them. She relates an anecdote about her family, who bought and then sold a Virginia farm in the 1940s after less than a year's residency. It seems that the police failed to intervene when the black workers who had lived on the farm as friends threatened her family after one of the black children was shot during a July Fourth celebration.
The anthology then moves to racism's influence on childhood development. Lisa Page's essay, ``High Yellow White Trash,'' examines the conflicted double-consciousness of a daughter whose black father and white mother have divorced. Enamored with her free-spirited father, the daughter adopts his speech patterns and stylized movements to the chagrin of her mother, who forces her to take ballet classes and horseback lessons. But, even as the daughter uses her ``white-girl disguise'' around her mother's relatives, she and her mixed-race siblings are still regarded as ``whites with defects.''
Toni Morrison's short story, ``Recitatif,'' examines the friendship that gradually sours between Roberta, a white girl, and Twyla, her black roommate, at a children's shelter when Roberta's mother abruptly separates the two at Sunday chapel service. Years later, Roberta completes the separation when she publicly ignores Twyla and adamantly protests against integration at the school that Twyla's son has been assigned to attend. That children learn about racism from adults' negative attitudes is one of Morrison's messages. The other is that races remain segregated despite class similarities.
Ann Filemyr's ``Loving Across the Boundary'' explores the boundaries of race that a white lesbian learns of through her bonding with a black woman. She discovers that her lover's race is more cause for ostracism than her same-sex preference and that some white feminists refuse to confront their fears about black women. The author boldly asserts that ``if white women who want to fight male supremacy can't stand up to their own fears around the issue of color and simultaneously fight white supremacy, how can they really undertake the work of women's liberation?''
Naomi Wolf's essay, ``The Racism of Well-Meaning White People,'' claims that the racism of white people she knows as a white woman stems more from how one views blacks than from how one acts. She cites an anecdote about her white neighbors' refusal to call the police on preadolescent black boys who raided their plum trees and then as teenagers burglarized their homes. These whites felt that they ``would lose credibility'' as ``decent'' white people if they were to report these children, whose transgressions were considered threatening and whose punishment would be greater than that of their equally culpable white counterparts.
Elsewhere, Wolf notes certain social codes that well-meaning whites adhere to. She says these whites don't use racist language in conversation, which may cause social ostracism, but that they do talk ``at length about black people who talk about racism,'' and tend to assume a conventionalized expression during conversations on race as if to convey that race is an impersonal force operating totally outside of their lives. ``A white person who claims to have no impediment of vision in this country is not . . . telling the whole truth,'' Wolf says.
The anthology appropriately closes with ``Are We So Different?,'' a dialogue between psychotherapists about the similar roles working women have, regardless of race, in marriages. While historical inequities account for many black women's sharing of most of the monetary responsibility in a marriage, research does not support the myths about black superwomen and fragile white women, the authors claim. Rather, married women of both races who work outside the home often encounter conflict over gender roles and household responsibilities.
Skin Deep contains no selection by a black writer on reverse racism and none by a white writer on race and contemporary feminism. Yet this anthology is a candid look at race that assumptions and misconceptions often obscure. The title represents the hope that the historical and cultural divisions between the races can be bridged, that human compassion will extend beyond limited personal boundaries and that the issue of race in the next generation will be only skin deep. MEMO: Rita B. Dandridge is a free-lance book reviewer who resides in
Chesapeake. by CNB