Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

Growing up as the daughter of white parents in the Deep South, while my parents did everything in their power to try and keep us from using racial slurs, there was so much racism imbedded in the area that it was nearly impossible to fight it. It ranged from the blatant to the subtle, and it stuck in ways that I will probably be discovering for the rest of my life. Baldwin touches upon the use of religion to control, and the belief that the white man is the marker to which the black man should aspire, and that is still very clear in the world... As black men and women are told that their natural hair should be tamed to make them more appropriate for the work place, that the vernacular of their homes and families is somehow uneducated, even as they are surrounded by people who code-switch from a redneck southern dialect or a tough talking New York slang at home, to proper grammar in the workplace. At the end of the day, no one should aspire to whiteness. Instead, all should aspire to be the best they can be of exactly who they are. This book, brilliantly written, greatly rocked my way of thinking. James Baldwin's grasp of humanity is one of the most realistic I've ever seen. He sees it and tells it just as it is.