A review by cclift1114
You Sound Like a White Girl: The Case for Rejecting Assimilation by Julissa Arce

challenging emotional informative reflective tense fast-paced

5.0

This was a very approachable and digestible book that argued against assimilation for all minorities in the U.S., with a special focus on Latinos, as this is mirrors the author’s own experience. I appreciated how Arce often emphasizes that her work is a reflection of her own experiences and that it cannot and should not be used to generalize for all. I felt she did a great job of taking a historical long view approach, but balanced with her own personal experiences. In this book she covers immigration, politics, racism, classism, education and more, and shows that for minorities, the system is set up so that no matter how much they try, they are not allowed to succeed as much as white Americans. While I did find the organization of the book to be a bit of jumping around from one topic to another, I thought that some of the other criticisms from other poor reviews missed the entire point of the book, especially when they criticize her for arguing against assimilation when she benefited from it. The whole point of the book is that she shouldn’t have had to do so, and she also recognizes that she was lucky to get where she got, which still wasn’t as far as she would have had she been white.