The Black Girl Next Door, A Memoir

(Written for The Pitt News. Ran in the print version in January 2010, but was not posted online.)

The Black Girl Next Door: A Memoir

by Jennifer Baszile

Touchstone Books/Simon & Schuster Trade Paperback

Grade: B

Facing the idea of prejudice and racism is not a comfortable experience so much as a necessary one. Brave authors and their memoirs can recall these actions and often open doors and allow great insight into how to deal with this issue.

Author Jennifer Baszile opens another door with “The Black Girl Next Door” and her ability to write prose that looks into the past while being creative all at once.

As a young girl, Baszille grew up in a time after the Civil Rights movement – a time when laws were passed that stated equality while prejudices still fought the progression of human rights. The years between then and now are her focus.

Baszile lived in a California suburb. In 1975, she was in first grade. She opens her memoir with a defining moment in her childhood – how she beat one of her friends in a race, but was told it was OK she won because black people had something special in their feet.

Yet over the course of the memoir, Baszile does not focus solely on stereotypes and racism alone.

She easily switches between her private and public lives, merging the separated spheres in her memoir. She recounts being a good black student at a predominantly white school and at home not totally understanding for years the enormity of even being able to attend such a school.

Her writing is easy going yet tense – it allows time for emotions to brew and yet entrances.

The tale of her childhood and adolescence counters the idea in textbooks that the civil rights movement was the end of the battle. The author suggests that perhaps integration - being the black girl next door – had been as hard on her as segregation had been for her father.

Baszile reveals tensions without always coming out and saying them – for example, how her parents desperately wanted to be integrated in the white community but forbade the dating and close association with white men. She explains how her father could bounce back and forth between a calm and sweet father and a man that could potentially unwillingly injure others – results of the stress of the prejudice he faced in his business.

Dealing with paradoxes in life while also dealing with puberty, Baszile has to discover herself for herself, rather than for a sense of definition by her parents.

It’s fallacious to declare this book is completely about prejudice, the tension after the civil rights movement, or a girl becoming a woman. It weaves elements from all these factors together.

“What was my dream?” Baszile questions. Her parents had her dream – what was her own? Baszile ‘s journey to becoming a woman might be the start to an answer – something to which many demographics could easily relate.