White Girl: A Story of School Desegregation » (New Edition)

Clara Silverstein directs the summer Chautauqua Writers' Center and is the author of three cookbooks, including A White House Garden Cookbook. Her articles have appeared in publications including American Heritage and the Boston Globe. She writes and teaches in Boston.

Silverstein, an editor for the Boston Herald, tells a little known story of a white child bused to a predominantly black school during the court-ordered busing programs of the 1970s. Her experience, which she recounts in a series of brief vignettes, mirrors those of black students in white schools and reveals the universal pain of the outsider. Silverstein questions the efficacy of using children as vanguards of social change and chides policymakers for their reluctance to face the consequences of oppression. Annotation ©2004 Book News, Inc., Portland, OR

Publishers Weekly

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. (Sept. 20) Copyright 2004 Reed Business Information.