Surviving The White Gaze

Synopsis: Rebecca Carroll grew up the only black person in her rural New Hampshire town. Adopted at birth by artistic parents who believed in peace, love, and zero population growth, her early childhood was loving and idyllic—and yet she couldn’t articulate the deep sense of isolation she increasingly felt as she grew older.

Author Rebecca Carroll
Surviving The White Gaze Npr

Rebecca Carroll discusses her new memoir that examines transracial adoption and forging her own Black identity. #DailyShow #TrevorNoah #RebeccaCarroll Subscr. As Rebecca Carroll vividly reveals in her searing memoir, Surviving the White Gaze, her adoptive parents were woefully unprepared to raise a Black child, clueless to the challenges she faced as the only Black resident of their rural New Hampshire town. Intimate and illuminating, Surviving the White Gaze is a timely examination of racism and racial identity in America today, and an extraordinarily moving portrait of resilience. Get your Book Stamped for Free. Intimate and illuminating, Surviving the White Gaze is a timely examination of racism and racial identity in America today, and an extraordinarily moving portrait of resilience. There are no customer reviews for this item yet.

Everything changed when she met her birth mother, a young white woman, who consistently undermined Carroll’s sense of her blackness and self-esteem. Carroll’s childhood became harrowing, and her memoir explores the tension between the aching desire for her birth mother’s acceptance, the loyalty she feels toward her adoptive parents, and the search for her racial identity. As an adult, Carroll forged a path from city to city, struggling along the way with difficult boyfriends, depression, eating disorders, and excessive drinking. Ultimately, through the support of her chosen black family, she was able to heal. Intimate and illuminating, Surviving the White Gaze is a timely examination of racism and racial identity in America today, and an extraordinarily moving portrait of resilience.

Thank you so much to Simon & Schuster Canada for providing me with an ARC of Surviving the White Gaze. Something that I want to continue working on this year is having a very diverse reading list, and I’ve committed to making sure that the books that I accept to review are written by members of the LGBTQIA+ community, or BIPOC authors. This memoir, along with the two other ARCs I received from Simon & Schuster for this publishing period, were all written by authors of colour, and I’m excited to continue supporting the work of authors of colour here on my blog.

While I know that memoirs maybe aren’t everybody’s cup of tea, I have really been getting into them this year. I have read some fantastic memoirs from super interesting people, and Rebecca Carroll’s is up there on the list of the most engaging ones. Carroll is very open about the relationships in her life, and vividly depicts how race has impacted her relationships with her family, significant others, and employers. While the discussion of how race can impact interpersonal relationships isn’t ground breaking, what I did find incredibly unique (at least from what I have read, maybe not to others) is the discussion of internalized racism, and how it can impact one’s relationship with oneself. Rebecca grew up as the only Black person in her town, and for many years of her life was not close to any older Black people. As a result, she has to construct her own identity and connection to Blackness, and seeing her struggle with that was a really emotional look into an aspect of racism that I don’t is as widely discussed as visible acts of racism.

Another part of the book that struck me was the discussion of Carroll’s relationship with her birth mother, Tess. While it was really hard to read about how the relationship between the two of them deteriorated, I feel like Carroll also brings attention to how insidious emotional and verbal abuse can be. It was easy to identify Tess’s treatment of Carroll as abusive as an outsider, but Carroll really brings you through the steps of how she came to recognize it herself. As someone who has witnessed an emotionally abusive relationship, you really do try to logic it away, especially if you don’t want to see it. Facing it takes a lot of courage, and I’m glad that Carroll was eventually able to do just that.

There were also so many little moments in the book that I really loved. Carroll often mentions how beauty standards promote ideals of white supremacy, and how the standard of beauty is the tiny white woman. She also discusses eating disorders, depression, and how the medical system is inherently racist. She mentions white feminism, and how true feminism must be intersectional instead of catering to white women. There are so many little things that really stood out to me about this book, and even though the main point wasn’t to discuss all of these issues, I still feel like Carroll does a great job of mentioning them in passing. Also, I think that even though a lot of her book mentions difficult experiences of racism and misogynoir, there are also real moments of Black joy that were beautiful. Like when she writes about Lottie and how she brushed and oiled her hair, or how she built her relationships with Ruby, Deja and Caryn. Another moment that really got me was how she described her relationship with her son, Kofi. Ms office 2013 download mac. The absolute joy and pride that I felt through the pages when she described him was beautiful.

Overall, I really enjoyed this book. Carroll gave a very real glimpse into her life, and shared many personal moments. I would like to say a very sincere thank you to her, as writing this book probably wasn’t easy, but the end result is absolutely incredible. Surviving the White Gaze is out tomorrow, on Feb. 2nd, and I really think that you should pick up a copy.

Have a great week ducks, and I’ll be back again soon with more reviews 🙂
~ Mon

I had been writing it for her. For her, and for Pecola Breedlove. Perhaps too ambitious or presumptuous or high-minded, I had, until the announcement of her death this week, been writing my memoir, Surviving the White Gaze, for Toni Morrison and Pecola Breedlove. Because I survived the white gaze for Pecola, and Morrison taught me how.

I knew Pecola first. I lived inside her skin, her ache; felt sickened, ashamed, and unseen by that baby doll’s dead blue eyes on one of the book’s early covers. Page after page of The Bluest Eye, I felt Pecola’s mind curl into anguish and succumb to a delusion better than reality. Pecola lost her mind because she wanted the blue eyes set inside the ceaseless standard of white beauty—a gaze so narcotic that it ravaged her body from flesh to bone—and I almost did, too.

I say that I knew Pecola first because Morrison’s writing of her was so thorough and fully realized that in my initial reading of The Bluest Eye, the character loomed larger than the author. This is what will happen to me, I remember thinking. If I keep internalizing the white gaze and contorting my own reflection in response to it, I will spiral into madness and still be seen as ugly.

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Unlike Pecola, I didn’t start out thinking I was ugly. My white adoptive parents, my white adoptive siblings (our parents’ biological children), their white friends and peers all viewed me as beautiful, dazzling. They also viewed me as somehow not black, the lone exotic urchin of a lost, mythical sea tribe. I thrived on the attention, and built my self-esteem on an image invented by white discomfort and default. I was a year shy of Pecola in age when my white fifth-grade teacher told me that I was “very pretty for a black girl,” which wasn’t the worst of it. “Most black girls are very ugly,” she said, scrunching up her face like she smelled something foul.

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But by the time the sophomore prom rolled around, when my friend’s father forbade him to take me as his date, even though we’d been friends for five years at that point—only conceding with the caveat that if he took me, no pictures would be taken—the white gaze had fully flipped its power and prism. My beauty and exoticism were all but dead. No longer brown-skinned or raceless, but suddenly black, and undesirable to boys.

I didn’t pray for blue eyes to escape a physically hostile world, as Pecola did, or in the hopes that blue eyes would make me better, more acceptable. “It had occurred to Pecola some time ago that if her eyes, those eyes that held pictures, and knew the sights—if those eyes of her were different, that is to say, beautiful, she herself would be different,” Morrison wrote. I didn’t actually want blue eyes, and it was too late for praying anyway. As I got older, however, all the white girls around me—with their straight, silken hair; with their impossibly pure and preferable skin—seemed to stand in symbolic, solidified mockery at my stupid naïveté in thinking that I could ever be beautiful.

And I didn’t even read The Bluest Eye until years after that.

Morrison was not taught at my high school in all-white rural New Hampshire, and my white adoptive parents didn’t know who she was until after I did, when I was in college and had my first black literature teacher. The passages I underlined and the corollary notes I made in my original copy of The Bluest Eye are, in some ways, as haunting to me as the story itself. “Then Pecola asked a question that had never entered my mind. ‘How do you do that? I mean, how do you get somebody to love you?’” My handwritten commentary in the margin: “She doesn’t know, because she doesn’t deem herself lovable.”

The Bluest Eye is not my favorite Morrison novel, but Pecola never left me. Sula is the one that made me want to survive for her, for Pecola. Its anger and ease, specific ideology, and hip-focused friendships all felt like hard-earned heaven, with so much at stake and everything else waiting for its time. Here, Morrison marked the visual of black womanness in lush simplicity: “The birthmark over her eye was getting darker and looked more and more like a stem and a rose.” Sula, with her flaws and disloyalty, was bold, and she was kindred.

Author Rebecca Carroll

Song of Solomon was next, then Tar Baby, Jazz, Beloved, Love, Home, A Mercy. I read them all. Some twice or three times. Morrison’s novels—the rich and feverish stories she created; the near-preposterous beauty of her worlds, with their resolute reckonings and intrinsic blackness—will be remembered as among the greatest of all time. And her essays, her nonfiction, demonstrate the same indisputable command of language, a bounty of quotable sentences and paragraphs and answers to how we can live better, with intellectual rigor and self-regard.

Ntfs for mac os x 6. It wasn’t until a 1998 interview Morrison gave to my then-boss, Charlie Rose, that I truly began to understand how stuck I’d been in this thing called “the white gaze.” The day she was on the show, I brought my books of hers to sign, which she did, graciously: “For Rebecca, with pleasure, Toni Morrison.” I nearly wept over her regal presence, her broad shoulders, the textured glory of her long, silver locks, and her soft, striking eyes. She was like a living, breathing effigy of our ancestors, every last one of us, all inside of her.

I watched and listened to the interview through the glass in the control room. I cringed when Rose asked if Morrison would ever write a book that was not “centered” on race. His narcissism was so foundational that he couldn’t see how his line of questioning embodied the point of her answer to this oft-revisited question of when she would write about white people: “I have had reviews in the past that have accused me of not writing about white people … as though our lives have no meaning and no depth without the white gaze.” Suddenly, I wanted more than anything else to get free. Free of the white gaze. I didn’t want to go crazy like Pecola had. I wanted my life to have meaning without the white gaze. Turns out, though, the white gaze doesn’t let go just because you want it to.

But when I think about Morrison shaping words, birthing them into existence, I feel heartened. She did language. And then she gave it to us, to me. “We die. That may be the meaning of life,” she said in her 1993 lecture for the Nobel Prize in Literature. “But we do language. That may be the measure of our lives.” What an abundant gift.