Customer Reviews

White Girl: A Story of School Desegregation

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WHITE GIRL: A Story of School Desegregation is a stirring and poignant
account of the upheaval surrounding court-ordered busing in the early
1970s. Like many students at the vanguard of this inevitable movement
to achieve school integration, sixth-grader Clara Silverstein faced
humiliation on a daily basis. She was spit on, tripped, and shoved by
her new schoolmates. This was a typical reaction to the majority of
the Black (the term of that era), children who were subject to this
law. But this fast-paced memoir inverts our understanding of
desegregation. Clara was white, one of the few white students in her
entire school. This is her story, a vivid description of a
controversial social experiment and an intimate chronicle of a young
girl's turbulent journey through adolescence.

Clara lived in Chicago and was very familiar with racial mixing. But
when the family relocated to Richmond, Virginia, after the death of
her father, her racial education escalated. She wonders how she
lived through several agitated situations: her first crush on a Black
classmate, naively wearing a jacket with a Confederate flag sewn on
to class, and surviving alone, when the other white classmates switched
to private schools.

Clara remained in the public schools and contends that if she learned
nothing else, she did come to understand the scourge of racism. Her
story is one that is usually lost in the historical accounts of busing,
and this fact motivated her to share her experience. Her story is woven
with in-depth historical details and several personal photographs. Some
thirty years later there are those who question the use of the school
system to create social change. This is a different view of this
racially motivated issue.

Reviewed by aNN
of The RAWSISTAZ Reviewers