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Black Girl/White Girl
 

Black Girl/White Girl

by Joyce Carol Oates

In 1975 Genna Hewett-Meade's college roommate died a mysterious, violent death partway through their freshman year. Minette Swift had been assertive, fiercely individualistic, and one of the few black girls at their exclusive, "enlightened" college—and Genna, daughter of a prominent civil defense lawyer, felt duty-bound to protect her at all costs. But fifteen years later, while... (read more)

Top tags: fiction,  race relations,  contemporary fiction,  coming of age,  college (all tags)

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Amazon Reviews (3)
 

Most Helpful Reviews

Liked It

carlags
  • Rated 4 stars

“Yes, this is a novel of a black girl, Minette, and a white girl, Genna - roommates at Schuyler College, Pa in 1975. However, this is ultimately Genna's story. Both girls are "fish out of water" on this all-girls, elite campus. Minette is the black, urban daughter of a preacher - and a struggling scholarship student. Genna is a white privileged, upper-class daughter of radical, counter-culture activists and granddaughter of the college's founder - facts she tries desperately to keep secret. It...”

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Didn’t Like It

Zevs
  • Rated 2 stars

“Amazon review: In 1975, racial tension still runs high at Genna Meade's mostly white Schuyler College in Pennsylvania. Her outcast black roommate, Minette Swift, is a D.C. preacher's daughter; Genna is descended from the college's founder. Minette misses home desperately; Genna, in contrast, avoids her "hippie" mother's phone calls while yearning for a visit from her absentee father, activist lawyer Maximilian Meade. Despite their differences, the girls muster an effortful friendship, due to...”

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Community:
  • Rated 3.234375 stars
Amazon:
  • Rated 3.375 stars
  

Newest Comments

  • MahoganyRain

    mahoganyrain said:

    “As some of the other have stated this book is not about the relationship between a black girl and a white girl attending college in the seventies. This is a story of a white girl reflecting on her life and family. The relationship she has with her roommate is more of a catalyst for her to confront her past and the person that she is.”

    posted Wednesday, April 2 2008
  • Januari

    januari said:

    “The Diversity Works group will be reading this book for a discussion to begin in November. Please feel free to drop by and join in the discussion!”

    posted Sunday, September 23 2007 ( | view 1 reply )
  • Artemis_98

    artemis_98 said:

    “This book just came out in PB -- saw it mentioned in the NYTimes book review. Looked up the review and thought the book would be a good fit for the Diversity Works shelf. Here's the review:
    October 15, 2006
    Roommates and Strangers
    By ELISSA SCHAPPELL

    BLACK GIRL / WHITE GIRL

    By Joyce Carol Oates.

    272 pp. Ecco/HarperCollins Publishers. $25.95.

    Joyce Carol Oates has never been shy about peering into the darkest corners of American culture. Her best books — “Blonde,” “Zombie” and “Black Water” — showcase her fascination with violence, her almost vampiric ability to tap into the subconscious of her troubled characters and her taste for appropriating real-life tragedy.

    Oates’s latest offering, “Black Girl / White Girl,” is no exception. Based, she explained in a recent interview, on “an actual sequence of events that took place in a college dormitory in the 1970’s,” the new novel looks at race relations through the lens of an uneasy relationship between two college roommates. Genna Hewett-Meade, the white girl of the title, is the daughter of a radical activist lawyer whose dealings with Vietnam protestors, the Black Panthers and various left-wing fugitives from justice have sentenced his family to a lifetime of F.B.I. surveillance and attendant paranoia. But if Genna’s immediate family is rigorously left wing, her ancestry is decidedly Establishment: she’s descended from the Quakers who founded exclusive Schuyler College, her alma mater.

    Haunted for 15 years by the brutal death of her enigmatic college roommate — a merit scholarship student named Minette Swift, the title’s black girl — Genna embarks on what she calls a “text without a title in the service of justice,” a personal “inquiry” in which she attempts to reconstruct the events of the fateful year when she and Minette were freshmen. Minette, she explains, didn’t die a “natural” or an “easy” death, and “I was the one to have saved her, yet I did not.”

    On the surface, the girls couldn’t seem more different. Genna is guiltily privileged, self-effacing and eager to please, while Minette swells with a sense of entitlement. As the daughter of a powerful and charismatic minister from Washington, D.C., she feels morally, spiritually and intellectually superior to her classmates. This makes her roundly unpopular with black and white alike, but inspires in Genna a fierce loyalty that increases as the harassment of Minette begins and then escalates. This loyalty is matched only by Genna’s determination to protect the reputation of the college her family founded.

    It turns out that these young women are, in profound ways, very much alike, and the struggles each endures with regard to her father’s reputation and expectations are the basis of two compelling — though, in Minette’s case, hazy — subplots. Both are also reckoning with violent events in their family’s history, believing they’re responsible for righting the wrongs of the past.

    How, Oates seems to be asking, can two roommates so intimately linked by proximity and a painful past be so divided by the color of their skin? Why can’t they step beyond black and white? The answers, she suggests, are really just more questions — a tactic that fits with the shadow-puppet style Genna uses to tell her story.

    Minette’s frustration with a college life that fails to meet her expectations (and yet exceeds her academic capabilities) is interesting to observe from the outside, but only for a while. Like timid Genna, the reader is mainly peering through the keyhole, spying only hints of Minette’s hidden self — a self increasingly twisted, poorly defended, broken down. Blinded by her fierce naïveté, Genna fails to see that Minette will never consider her a friend. And Minette, hardened into defensive self-righteousness, fails to see that Genna may be her only friend.

    An intriguing plot turn in the last third of the novel seems to promise much, but it ends up making Oates’s portraits of Genna and Minette less satisfying. The twist — not the characters — is what stays with you. By now, it’s a cliché to comment on the rate at which Oates turns out books, making Trollope look as if he was writing in handcuffs. Still, this one feels rushed to a conclusion.

    Which is a pity, because Oates is grappling with some big issues here. Genna’s observations, 15 years after Minette’s mysterious death, suggest that she’s only beginning to understand the myriad ways in which black and white can yield so many shades of gray. When she wonders, thinking back, if a crucial act “hadn’t been purely personal, aimed against Minette Swift as an individual, and not ‘racist,’ ” she must also acknowledge “how swiftly and crudely the personal becomes the racial.” In the end, she’s still “riddled with guilt like rot or cancer, but like an afflicted person I seem not always to know where my affliction lies.”

    Elissa Schappell is editor at large of Tin House magazine, a contributing editor at Vanity Fair and the author of “Use Me,” a novel.
    ”

    posted Tuesday, July 10 2007
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