The Black Girl Next Door: A Memoir

A powerful, beautifully written memoir of Black girlhood, race, and coming of age in an exclusive white suburb in post-Civil Rights California in the 1970s and 1980s.

At six years of age, after winning a foot race against a white classmate, Jennifer Baszile was humiliated to hear her classmate explain that black people "have something in their feet to make them run faster than white people." When she asked her teacher about it, it was confirmed as true. The next morning, Jennifer's father a...