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Raceless: In
Search of Family, Identity, and the Truth About Where I
Belong
by Georgina Lawton
c.2021, Harper Perennial
$17.99 / $21.99 Canada
304 pages
Surviving the
White Gaze: A Memoir
by Rebecca Carroll
c.2021, Simon & Schuster
$26.00 / $35.00 Canada
320 pages
By Terri Schlichenmeyer
The Truth Contributor
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Who are you?
That's a question some people never ask themselves:
seemingly intuitively, they know the answer at birth and
they don't think about it again. Then there are those who
struggle with knowing until their last breath. Still others
have stories to tell about their search to learn who they
are. Read on...
One big secret-not-secret lies at the heart of
Raceless by Georgina Lawton.
Born after a long labor in a London hospital in 1989, Lawton
was the child of a (white) British father and a (white)
Irish mother, and with her black hair and deep brown eyes,
she "was not the baby they had been expecting." To save
face, her conception, the result of a one-night stand,
wasn't talked about, and her curly hair and brown skin was
blamed on a genetic quirk on her mother's side. End of
story.
Lawton was raised with love, never questioning anything
until four years ago, when she took a DNA test that
indicated Nicaraguan ancestry.
Her father had died by then, and her mother refused to
discuss it.
The frustration and the not-knowing sent Lawton on a
round-the-world excursion, from Great Britain to Nicaragua
to the U.S., South Africa, and elsewhere, in a search for
racial identity. This book is the result: a
thoughtfully-written, beautifully-told look at Blackness,
culture and love. It's a story that sometimes reads faintly
like a travelogue, but one in which the search is not for
interesting sites, so much as it is for insight,
making this a quietly persistent, personal, and wonderful
story to enjoy.
Like Lawton, Rebecca Carroll grew up in circumstances
that were unique: as a little girl, she was literally the
only Black person living in her small New England town. In
Surviving the White Gaze, she writes about a
picture-perfect childhood, the beliefs she was raised with,
a feeling that there was something amiss, and her ultimate
reckoning.
The story of how she was born and entered her family's lives
was something Carroll knew from a very early age. Unlike
Lawton's family, Carroll's parents never hid anything from
her; she was told the names of her birth parents and she
knew some of the woman's close relatives so it's a bit of a
surprise that meeting her (white) birth mother was rather
anticlimactic. Still, that meeting and the subsequent
relationship they forged left Carroll walking a long, fine
line between two mothers, and looking for the identity she
craved all along.
Surviving the White Gaze
is good: it's full of nostalgia for anyone over 50 and it
perfectly explains the inner turmoil and delicate balance of
straddling two worlds while searching for place. Also,
though, it's heavily peopled and the number of names you'll
need to keep track of can be a challenge. Just beware, and
take this thoughtful, thought-provoking memoir as it comes.
Then, once you've devoured these two books, there's good
news: in the last few months, many authors have taken this
journey of identity and are willing to share, no matter who
you are.
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