The Black Girl Next Door
Jennifer Baszile
Touchstone, Jan 13 2009, $25.00
ISBN: 9781416543275
In the mid 1970s in affluent California, elementary school student, Jennifer Baszile and her sister were the only black kids in the building. In the first grade she obtained a deep lesson on de facto racism and ignorance after winning a running race. The loser, naturally white, as everyone else except her sister was, “intelligently” commented that blacks had something special in their feet. Her teacher confirmed that as a truism. Her dad took exception but was careful not to have the school think he was a ghetto thug as he understood they were the local Jackie Robinson and had to behave with more decorum than their neighbors. As integration was pushed as social and legal policy, Jennifer would see de jure racism when she visited her paternal relatives in Louisiana and de facto segregation in Detroit seeing her maternal blood. Still her parents pushed her and her sibling to live the American dream as black pioneers, which the author succeeded because she became the first black female professor at Yale’s History Department.
THE BLACK GIRL NEXT DOOR is a superb memoir that looks deep into one black family making it in an all white wealthy neighborhood during a time when the Civil Rights movement was pushing integration against racial laws and society barriers. Professor Baszile provides powerful anecdotal incidents of so-called supporters of integration resenting the first black family on their block and how it felt to be the only exceptions to the all white rule in so many scenarios; not just school. Readers will appreciate this superb well written window to how society has come a long way due to brave settlers like the parents of the author who wanted more than the dream for their offspring; they courageously went after the opportunity fully aware they would be the token black family next door.
Harriet Klausner
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