WHEN I WAS WHITE

“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.