Book description
An Esquire Best Book of 2021
A stirring and powerful memoir from black cultural critic Rebecca Carroll recounting her painful struggle to overcome a completely white childhood in order to forge her identity as a black woman in America.
Rebecca Carroll grew up the only black person in her…
Why read it?
1 author picked Surviving the White Gaze as one of their favorite books. Why do they recommend it?
The writing is gorgeous, but it is the story – heartbreaking at first and then, as it closes, heartwarming – that grabs you.
Rebecca Carroll, marked as black, is adopted by white parents and raised in an all-white town. Determined to learn more about herself, she sets out to reconnect with her birth parents, but what she learns is a set of hard, painful truths. As the thread slowly unspools, her white birth mother is also revealed as abusive and controlling.
Still searching for a sense of who she is, Carroll discovers her own blackness through found family, and by…
From Matthew's list on heartbreaking memoirs of race and adoption.
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