 Bruce and thank you everyone at the writing project for just being such a big support. I think if not for those two summers that I did teachers as writers that little week in the summer to write and in my own writing part of my summer institute, I don't know if I would have really immersed myself enough in writing to complete this project so I'm forever grateful to the writing project. So I was thinking about the theme when I first got Bruce's email and I went on YouTube and watched the video of the song. I don't know if anybody else did that but the link I went to the song was translated into Spanish and I thought that's somehow really appropriate for voice and identity and respectful dialogue and I was thinking that in that we are called upon to be translators kind of cultural translators. When we bring literature into the classroom for our kids from a different perspective we're translating for them something they can't necessarily see and when we help them write about their own experiences for communication with the world we're helping them to translate and I think the key piece that makes that most effective is telling a story and I thought that was my brilliant idea until I went to my two workshops today where they basically said the same thing so I think we're all hearing that. It's the element of story that allows people to open up and listen and hear us and so one example is when I teach Raisin in the Sun which I'm hearing also a lot of folks are doing. If I start Theoretical and I talk about housing and the GI bill and redlining and all this sometimes and I still do that but that will sometimes trigger some not very respectful dialogue but as soon as we begin to play and the kids are reading Walter and Mama and Benita and I'm asking them to play those roles or connect they can always empathize they can always find a way to connect so it's the story and when they write too I was lucky enough to do the argument C3WP argument training um and I find when they write arguments about social issues when they include some anecdotes some personal connection even especially a story it makes it just so much more approachable and readable and effective so so it is a good segue because in this memoir I was really trying to tell a story about a subject that's often written about in a very academic theoretical research based kind of way which is whiteness and white privilege and white identity in the context of racism so when I began to to read about this and really think about this somewhere in my 20s I couldn't find a lot of stories memoirs literary memoirs that had that as a forefront of an issue I've read a lot of really good books but one of my inspirations was Tony Morrison who says that if there's a book that you really want to read and it hasn't been written then you have to write it so I set out somewhere in my 30s about 15 years ago to write what I wanted to be a literary memoir about a white person who's going through the transformation of understanding race racism white privilege white identity and just what that looks like on the inside um and another inspiration for me was Beverly Tatum so one of the books I read during that period was why are all the black kids sitting together in the cafeteria and she actually has a chapter called white identity development which I never had heard of never realized people wrote about and I studied that you know religiously and one of the things she said in there was that more white people should tell their stories to sort of help each other navigate this road to a new way of thinking in a way of becoming more active and anti-racist so those were a couple inspirations that made me write people often ask like what what made you write this book those were some things so the book's called too white and um and I like to speak a little bit about what that means it's sort of a provocative title and I often wish I had more time when I'm telling people about my book to really explain it so I'm going to take a little bit of time and it really means a variety of things so the book is written in five parts um in each part I think too white means something slightly different so in part one I write about growing up in suburban Connecticut um and just being very racially isolated so in part one I'm exploring I think the meaning of being too white as being too isolated and so many of us and our students are still living that out so if you're in such an isolated society it's really hard to make connections and have empathy and get past stereotypes and assumptions and prejudice and biases and things that we absorb um so that's one meaning of too white I was lucky enough um my senior year of college to go abroad for a year to Ghana West Africa and I loved it and um when I began comparing myself um where I was from to that culture I began to feel that too white was to be too reserved to controlled to repressed I was from a very waspy family and um and I started to see things in terms of race really polarizing it in terms of black and white um and starting to really glamorize what I decided was black culture which was the opposite of all those things it was very vibrant and expressive and connected and social and communal and I started really craving that identity um and then really started disparaging and being ashamed of and wanting to reject what I saw as whiteness which was you know controlled and repressed and reserved so I went through that phase for a long time it's probably very annoying to a lot of people when I came home I had got like dreadlocks and only you know it was yeah so this is a long identity story um but when I came home I also began teaching and my first job was in Bridgeport Connecticut which was just really savage poverty that I had never seen and it was crazy to me that it was about 20 minutes from where I grew up in UK and Connecticut which is probably one of the most affluent communities in the world um so that drive just blew my mind and um and too white began to mean too racist too complicit in a racist system that I was finally seeing really clearly in front of my eyes um and without a background in white identity development or anti-racism or social justice which I didn't have it just began to feel um yeah I began to be very angry and really um angry at whiteness and being white and then not really having a way of knowing what to do about that so the identity struggle kind of continued um and I also began to see too white as too individualistic it seemed to me that there this capitalist system and and being out for yourself was sort of a white thing and everywhere I looked people of color seemed to be able to build community a little better so I really did kind of um get stuck in that polarization for a long time um I finally left Bridgeport so in part four I moved to a community in Cambridge in Boston and intentionally sought out friends of color and began to reject my white friends um continued culturally appropriating all kinds of black identity forms and and really copying um in some in some ways negative stereotypes that I had absorbed about blackness that was the irony in trying to like reject racism I was actually adopting a lot of racist practices so it's really conflicted and confused um the good news is that I I left Boston came out to western mass and I did start to read and I started to write um and began to learn about anti-racism and social justice luckily I was in Amherst and there was a lot of little pockets of people educating and doing work around those things um but then I had a biracial daughter I was teaching in a classroom and I just started to learn um I attended something called the white privilege conference and and began to understand my experience in a larger context um so I learned that you can't necessarily be less white but you can be less of all those other things you can be less racially isolated you can be less reserved and controlled if that's how you want to be you can be less individualistic and more community-centered um you can be less complicit and racist systems once you begin learning and and learning how to dismantle those things and joining together with people who are working on dismantling those things um and you can be not necessarily less privileged but more aware of your privilege able to extend those privileges to other people um and less guilty there's a lot of examining white guilt too in here and also learning that that's something you can move past and I forgot to read my Baldwin quote turn it I'm going to read you two Baldwin quotes I like to start with one and end with the other but um James Baldwin is probably one of the best writers about race in America um and he says white people in this country will have quite enough to do in learning how to accept and love themselves and each other and when they have achieved this which will not be tomorrow and may very well be never the negro problem will no longer exist or it will no longer be needed so I really love how he shines the light on the psychology the white psychology that gave birth to systemic racism so he writes about systemic racism which is really important but he also really gets into the emotional and spiritual and psychological landscape of white people who created racism and that's what I was craving to learn about um and trying to write about myself um so at the end I want to share a second quote from towards the end of his book as well it says if we and now I mean the relatively conscious whites and the relatively conscious blacks who must like lovers insist on or create the consciousness of the others do not falter in our duty now we may be able handful that we are to end the racial nightmare and achieve our country and change the history of the world so I found those um really inspiring quotes from him