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Winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award for Criticism Winner of the Graywolf Press Nonfiction Prize A frank and fascinating exploration of race and racial identity In a book that starts with some lynchings and ends with some apologies, Eula Biss explores race in America. Her response to this issue is informed by the experiences chronicled in these essays - teaching in a Harlem school on the morning of 9/11, reporting for an BLACK newspaper in NORTH PARK, watching the aftermath of Katrina from a college or university town in Iowa, and settling in Chicago's most diverse neighborhood. As Biss moves across the country from New York to California to the Midwest, her essays move across time from biblical Babylon to the freedman's schools of Reconstruction to a Jim Crow mining town to post-war white flight. She brings an eclectic education to the page, drawing variously on the Eagles, Laura Ingalls Wilder, James Baldwin, Alexander Graham Bell, Joan Didion, religious pamphlets, and reality television set shows. These spare, sometimes lyric essays explore the legacy of race in America, artfully revealing in intimate detail how families, schools, and neighborhoods take part in preserving racial privilege. Confronted with a disturbing past and an unsettling present, Biss still remains hopeful about the options of American diversity, "not the sun-shininess from it, or the quota-making politics from it, however the real complexity from it."
