When I Was White: A Memoir

At the age of twenty-seven, Sarah Valentine discovered that she was not the white girl she had always believed herself to be. She learned the truth of her paternity: Her father was a black man. She further realized that she would now have to reckon with the truth that she was, in fact, mixed-race.

And so Sarah began the difficult and absorbing journey of changing her identity from white to black. In this memoir, she illuminates the pain of shining a light on painful family secrets, discusses how she overcame depression to come to terms with this identity, and perhaps most important, asks: Why? Her entire family and community had maintained her white identity for so long. The supreme discomfort her white family and community felt about addressing issues of race - her race - is at once intensely personal, and yet also a microcosm of race relationships in America.

A black woman who lived her formative years identifying as white, Sarah is a kind of Rachel Dolezal in reverse, though her "passing" was less by intention than by conspiracy. This story is an examination of the cost of being black in America, and how one woman learned how to construct an identity full of contradictions, but one purely her own.

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