When I Was White

April 22, 2019
In this fervent and heartfelt memoir, Valentine, an artist-in-residence at Northwestern University, tells of coming-of-age in Pittsburgh, Pa., as the daughter of two white parents who refused to acknowledge an ethnicity hinted at by her appearance, and a family secret.. Her mother and business consultant father were married in the 1970s when Valentine was born, and she describes an ordinary childhood in a loving family of Italian and Irish descent. Early on, she clues in that she is “different” and even though her parents avoid the topic of race, others make note of her darker skin color (for instance, a school guidance counselor suggests she apply for a minority scholarship). Valentine attends Carnegie Mellon University, and at age 27 she presses her mother on the details of her past; her mother claims she was raped at a college party by an unknown black man (though her recollection is vague). The narrative moves fluidly between past and present as Valentine tries to make sense of the lies and misconceptions that have plagued her throughout her life. Beset with conflicting emotions and a sense of betrayal, Valentine begins a futile search to locate her biological father, and the revelation of Valentine’s conception (later confirmed by a DNA test that revealed 45% sub-Saharan African) will be simultaneously startling and yet expected to the reader. This is a disturbing and engrossing tale of deep family secrets.

June 15, 2019
"You're the blackest white girl I've ever seen": Writer and translator Valentine explores a past that had been carefully hidden from her. There are phenotypes, and then there are culture, nature and nurture, and all that comes between. Born in 1977, the author, whose biological father was African American, grew up thinking she was Irish and Italian, the fact of her parentage deliberately hidden. "I didn't know much about race," she writes of a childhood friendship with a child who looked like her, "but I knew it existed; I thought some people were black, but most people were normal." That learned sense of "normalcy" comes under close examination in this deftly written book, marked by all kinds of telling milestones: Her classmates called her "Slash," the nickname of the mixed-race Guns N' Roses guitarist, while a Nigerian guest speaker in a middle school social studies class called on her to model a fabric used in traditional clothing, yielding a dawning awareness that she, and not someone else, was "the other." The point was driven home when a guidance counselor encouraged her to apply for minority scholarships, to which her adoptive father responded that she would be depriving someone who needed them; he added, "don't tell your mother about this." Her family's denial of the obvious seems puzzling, but Valentine has much to say about the intersection of the personal, the biological, and the cultural. She writes, for instance, that she became a fluent speaker of Russian, with the ability to think and write at a highly accomplished level about Russian literature and with plenty of time on the ground in Russia, but all that near-native ability "didn't make me Russian." In a nice turn, she later writes of discovering the existence of a diasporic group that moved into the Caucasus in the 17th century, "making them literal African Caucasians." Valentine's journey of self-discovery is affecting, a hard-won quest to arrive at an origin story that suits the facts rather than turns away from them. A valuable contribution to the literature of race and its problematics.

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August 1, 2019
There's an old family photograph of Valentine with her two younger brothers when they were children. Her brown skin and tightly curled hair suggest little else but African American parentage, especially compared to the white skin and straight hair of the two boys beside her, her biological half-brothers; all three share a mother. But Valentine's parents, especially her mother, maintained a vise-like grip on the family narrative, insisting that Valentine was white, an obvious fiction to family and friends but one to which they all nevertheless adhered until Valentine at 27 forced the issue, and her mother finally admitted that her father was African American. Sil Lai Abrams had a similar story to tell in her memoir, Black Lotus (2016). What binds their stories isn't so much the fathers' physical absences but the emotional absence of their mothers, who were unable to connect with that part of their daughters' heritage and, therefore, to their daughters themselves. We feel every step of Valentine's struggle, from feeling physically broken to becoming emotionally stronger as she reaches for self-acceptance and self-definition.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2019, American Library Association.)

March 1, 2019

Artist in residence at Northwestern University, Valentine thought she was white until age 27, when she learned that her father was in fact black. Thus, she had to adapt to a new identity as a mixed-race woman and her family's and community's unwillingness to acknowledge this crucial aspect of her selfhood.

Copyright 2019 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.