Beyond Integration
Two Recent Books on Race
Jenell Williams Paris
July 1, 2000
My First White Friend: Confessions on Race, Love, and Forgiveness, by Patricia Raybon (Penguin, 1997), 256 pp.
By the Color of Our Skin: The Illusion of Integration and the Reality of Race, by Leonard Steinhorn and Barbara Diggs-Brown (Plume, 2000), 320 pp.
Patricia Raybon looked at her newborn baby with alarm. America's race problems nestled in her arms, embodied in her child's nearly white skin. My First White Friend begins with a plea: "God help me." For most of her life, Raybon's racial identity only made sense in terms of whiteness. She was a stellar black child and young adult, successful in school, friendships, and church life. It was, however, a white-pleasing kind of black success. Beneath her smiling achievements, and behind her desire for white affirmation, raged hatred-hatred of white people, white history, white Christianity, and just plain whiteness itself.
Now in her forties, Raybon recounts well-chosen and well-told stories about her fully Christian and fully hate-filled life. Experiencing Christianity in a racialized society made her ambivalent-the God of the African-American tradition seemed powerful and liberating, but to bow down to a white Jesus was foolish and embarrassing. If you love him, you're "an Oreo Negro stunned by religion, numbed by too much pork fat and gospel singing." Her rage against God is family hate, the kind that stems from true love and belonging.
Raybon's "first white friend" was a girl named Kelly. In 1963 Raybon's father moved his family up and out of Denver to a nearby suburb. To 14-year-old Patricia, the mostly white suburb and its new junior high school were anything but "nearby" her former urban neighborhood. "That first week at the Northglenn school lasted a year in my soul." ...
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