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A review by kareenbeanreads
My Time Among the Whites: Notes from an Unfinished Education by Jennine Capó Crucet
4.0
This was a thought-provoking memoir/essay collection. I appreciated the sentiments of the author as she covered such a wide range of topics - from being a child of immigrants and the concept of the "American Dream" to weddings and the concept of marriage. I felt that the earlier essays in this piece were a bit stronger, but all were overall intriguing and left me with a lot to think about.
A few of my favorite quotes were centered around race and what is considered "American":
"But I’ve come to see the American Dream for what it really is: a lie my parents had little choice but to buy into and sell to me, a lie that conflated working hard with passing for, becoming, and being white."
"Many white people I’ve met often think of themselves as culture-less, as vanilla: plain, boring, American white. What they are revealing when they say this, which they often do in jest, is how little race impacts their lives, how whiteness is ubiquitous to them, and they mistake that ubiquitousness as a kind of neutrality or regularness that renders their race and culture invisible to themselves."
A few of my favorite quotes were centered around race and what is considered "American":
"But I’ve come to see the American Dream for what it really is: a lie my parents had little choice but to buy into and sell to me, a lie that conflated working hard with passing for, becoming, and being white."
"Many white people I’ve met often think of themselves as culture-less, as vanilla: plain, boring, American white. What they are revealing when they say this, which they often do in jest, is how little race impacts their lives, how whiteness is ubiquitous to them, and they mistake that ubiquitousness as a kind of neutrality or regularness that renders their race and culture invisible to themselves."