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bookfare 's review for:
Surviving the White Gaze: A Memoir
by Rebecca Carroll
In the early 70s, Rebecca Carroll lives with her loving, adopted family in a rural New Hampshire town where she is the only Black person. At the age of 10, she meets her white mother and builds a relationship with her and her half brothers, and navigates her racial identity within these two families. Carroll aims to show her reader how the two very different relationships between her birth mother and her adoptive parents led to confusion with her identity and diminished self-worth.
This book is a unique coming of age memoir that shows how much representation matters. The story itself immediately drew me in, but what kept me reading was how Carroll turns a reflective lens on her past to show how important it is for kids to be encouraged to understand their identities and see themselves in the people around them. On one hand, there are Carroll’s adoptive parents who take a color-blind approach to her race, which I think a lot of adults taught their children; don’t speak about (and therefore learn about and engage with) race and it won’t be an issue. On the other hand, we have Carroll’s birth mother who co-opts her Blackness and claims to know more about it (as a white woman!) than she does, gaslighting her and repressing her in another way. Her birth mother often treats her more as an adult and a friend than has a child who should be nurtured. No spoilers but I read several parts of this book with my fist against my forehead, aghast at how the adults in her life speak to her.
Surviving the White Gaze is an apt title for this memoir, her whole life she was held up in the way that her white environment thought she should be, rather than looking at what she needed. This book sucked me in and I sped through it in a matter of hours. This was my first time reading Carroll’s writing and I look forward to picking up her past books. Thank you so much to Netgalley and Simon and Schuster for the chance to read this memoir early.
This book is a unique coming of age memoir that shows how much representation matters. The story itself immediately drew me in, but what kept me reading was how Carroll turns a reflective lens on her past to show how important it is for kids to be encouraged to understand their identities and see themselves in the people around them. On one hand, there are Carroll’s adoptive parents who take a color-blind approach to her race, which I think a lot of adults taught their children; don’t speak about (and therefore learn about and engage with) race and it won’t be an issue. On the other hand, we have Carroll’s birth mother who co-opts her Blackness and claims to know more about it (as a white woman!) than she does, gaslighting her and repressing her in another way. Her birth mother often treats her more as an adult and a friend than has a child who should be nurtured. No spoilers but I read several parts of this book with my fist against my forehead, aghast at how the adults in her life speak to her.
Surviving the White Gaze is an apt title for this memoir, her whole life she was held up in the way that her white environment thought she should be, rather than looking at what she needed. This book sucked me in and I sped through it in a matter of hours. This was my first time reading Carroll’s writing and I look forward to picking up her past books. Thank you so much to Netgalley and Simon and Schuster for the chance to read this memoir early.