Perhaps Another Story Of Black Middle Class Angst (and Anger) That Must Be Exposed-A New Book To Explore-"The Black Girl Next Door"

While walking through the virtual halls of the New York Times book section this afternoon, I came across a pretty interesting article highlighting a new literary effort entitled, The Black Girl Next Door: A Memoir. Although the Times critique seems to poke holes in author (and Yale’s first black female professor of history...what did I say about those damn firsts!) Jennifer Baszile's failure to inform the prospective reader about her rise in the world of academia, any book that deviates from the stereotypical African-American inner city struggle is worthy of further analysis. Here's an excerpt from the Times piece:

Jennifer Baszile grew up in Palos Verdes Estates, an elite and nearly all-white suburb of Los Angeles in the 1970s and ’80s, and she and her family were sometimes called, without a hint of irony, “the real live Huxtables from ‘The Cosby Show.’ ”

They seemed to have it all figured out. Ms. Baszile’s father ran a successful metals business and drove a Mercedes; her mother was known for her volunteer work. They had a large house a block from the ocean; they were attractive and well dressed; they took expensive vacations. Ms. Baszile’s older sister was her high school’s first black homecoming queen; the author was the first black student-body president. (Today Ms. Baszile is Yale’s first black female professor of history.)

Beneath the placid surface, however, Ms. Baszile writes in her new memoir, “The Black Girl Next Door,” lay churning emotions and brewing drama — “consuming fears of poverty, failure, exclusion and rejection” — as well as a debilitating kind of rage. By moving to one of America’s most exclusive suburbs, the Basziles thought they had outrun race.

“We were sorely mistaken,” she says.

The Basziles’ experience in Palos Verdes Estates is a story for the ostensibly post-racial Obama era: the tale of an upper-middle-class African-American family striving to get ahead while sensing that it is somehow at the same time too black and not nearly black enough. It’s a story about class as much as about race, and about the elusive, sometimes almost spectral limits of segregation.

The Basziles’ arrival in Palos Verdes Estates was met with limited if nonetheless ugly resistance. Some boys scrawl a racial epithet on the family’s front walk and paint a cherub in the family’s front yard fountain black. The Basziles fight back, calling in the F.B.I. and hanging a newspaper clipping about the epithet on their mailbox with a sign that declared: “These Are Your Neighbors.”

The family eventually settles in, more or less happily, and “The Black Girl Next Door” becomes a chronicle of Ms. Baszile’s school years and a hashing out of dozens of smaller, if no less hurtful, slights and rejections: white kids wanting to fight her; white boys not dancing with her or not asking her out on dates; a general gnawing feeling that she does not belong and is not fully accepted.

When her class studies the Civil War era, she observes: “They got Rhett and Scarlett, while I got Mammy without the humor.”

Stay tuned for more on this story and in particular, Ms. Baszile, as we will try our best to contact her for an interview. In the interim, click on the link below for the complete article:


Perfect Neighbors, Perfect Strangers