Marita Golden - Skin Deep: Black Women & White Women Write About Race

A N A NCHOR B OOK
PUBLISHED BY DOUBLEDAY
a division of Bantam Doubleday Dell Publishing Group, Inc.
1540 Broadway, New York, New York 10036

A NCHOR B OOKS , D OUBLED AY , and the portrayal
of an anchor are trademarks of Doubleday, a division of
Bantam Doubleday Dell Publishing Group, Inc.

Skin Deep was originally published in hardcover by
Nan A. Talese/Doubleday in 1995. The Anchor Books
edition is published by arrangement with Doubleday.

Contents Under Pressure: White Women/Black History by Catherine Clinton. Copyright1995 by Catherine Clinton.

Loving Across the Boundary by Ann Filemyr. Copyright1995 by Ann Filemyr.

Reaching Across the Feminist Racial Divide by Dorothy Gilliam. Copyright1995 by Dorothy Butler Gilliam.

Across the Glittering Sea by Jewelle Gomez. Copyright1995 by Jewelle L. Gomez.

Are We So Different? by Cathleen Gray and Shirley Bryant. Copyright1995 by Cathleen Gray and Shirley Bryant.

Legacies and Ghosts by Patricia Browning Griffith. Copyright 1995 by Patricia Browning Griffith.

Feminism in Black and White by bell hooks. Copyright1995 by bell hooks, a.k.a. Gloria J. Watkins.

What Tina Has to Do with It by Beverly Lowry. Copyright1995 by Beverly Lowry.

Adjustments by Mary Morris. Copyright1995 by Mary Morris.

Recitatif by Toni Morrison. Copyright1983 by Toni Morrison. Reprinted by permission of International Creative Management, Inc.

Negative by Joyce Carol Oates. Copyright1991 by The Ontario Review.

High Yellow White Trash by Lisa Page. Copyright1995 by Lisa Page.

Hello, Stranger by Gayle Pemberton. Copyright1995 by Gayle Pemberton.

Overhand and Underhand by Retha Powers. Copyright1995 by Retha Powers.

Tuba, 1921 by Susan Straight. Copyright1995 by Susan Straight.

The Revenge of Hannah Kemhuff from In Love & Trouble: Stories of Black Women. Copyright1973 by Alice Walker. Reprinted by permission of Harcourt Brace & Company.

A Worn Path from A Curtain of Green and Other Stories. Copyright1941 and renewed 1969 by Eudora Welty. Reprinted by permission of Harcourt Brace & Company.

The Racism of Well-Meaning White People by Naomi Wolf. Copyright1995 by Naomi Wolf.

The Library of Congress has cataloged the Nan A. Talese/Doubleday edition as follows:

Skin deep: Black women and White women write about race /
edited by Marita Golden and Susan Richards Shreve.
p. cm.
1. Afro-American women. 2. RacismUnited States.
3. United StatesRace relations.
4. WomenUnited StatesSocial conditions.
I. Golden, Marita. II. Shreve, Susan Richards.
E185.8e.Se 1995
305.80973dc20
94-44606

eISBN: 978-0-307-79478-9
Copyright1995 by Marita Golden and Susan Richards Shreve

All Rights Reserved

v3.1

W hen my friend and colleague Susan Shreve suggested we edit an anthology of writing about race by black and white women, I had several reactions. My first thought quite honestly was Uh-ohyou know, that primal, urgent, squishy inside feeling that synthesizes the fear you got as a child approaching a dark room in a dark house, as you clutched the hand of your girlfriend and she clutched yours and you both argued over who would knock or push the door open and then who would turn on the light. You do it. No, you. Youre taller. But youre braver!

I also felt, about time! and that we were as qualified and prepared to pull together such a collection as anybody else. I was fiercely, totally excited by the prospect of working with a group of women prepared to step up to the plate on the one subject in America nobody really wants to discuss. Correction: whites dont want to discuss, and blacks cant stop discussing. Ironically, white America will catapult books about race to the top of the best-seller list, even as racism remains a national open wound. Obsession aint solution, however, because reading even at its most intense and verisimilitudinous is vicarious, and once you close the book youre off the hook. Then add to the equation that this was going to be a meditation scripted and improvised by women. Women who had been raised to be polite, never to rock the boat, and even though we had while our parents and our men werent looking and sometimes even when they were, subsequently mastered shaking up the dinghy and gloried in it, I wondered if race would scare the rebel, the hell raiser, the wild woman out of us. I mean who really gets down, digs deep over that four-letter word? RACE. And even bolstered by womens actual, yet often mythologized, talent for intimacy and revelation, race remains taboo even among the hippest, the most liberated, progressive, and righteous among us. The more I thought about it the more I realized that editing this anthology was going to be unsettling, frustrating, surprising, and perhaps a bit messy. I couldnt wait to get started.

The contour of the project in the beginning pretty much followed the contours of racial reality and politics in America. Several white women writers we approached were terrified (thats the only word) to broach the subject. Some said yes and then said no and meant it. The black women couldnt wait to pick up the pen or settle down in front of their computers. No fear there. Write about race? Write about my life! But pretty soon it became clear that in different ways we were