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Bezig met laden... These Walls Between Us: A Memoir of Friendship Across Race and Classdoor Wendy Sanford
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From an author of the best-selling women's health classic Our Bodies, Ourselves comes a bracingly forthright memoir about a life-long friendship across racial and class divides. A white woman's necessary learning, and a Black woman's complex evolution, make These Walls Between Us a "tender, honest, cringeworthy and powerful read." (Debby Irving, author, Waking Up White.) In the mid-1950s, a fifteen-year-old African American teenager named Mary White (now Mary Norman) traveled north from Virginia to work for twelve-year-old Wendy Sanford's family as a live-in domestic for their summer vacation by a remote New England beach. Over the years, Wendy's family came to depend on Mary's skilled service--and each summer, Mary endured the extreme loneliness of their elite white beachside retreat in order to support her family. As the Black "help" and the privileged white daughter, Mary and Wendy were not slated for friendship. But years later--each divorced, each a single parent, Mary now a rising officer in corrections and Wendy a feminist health activist--they began to walk the beach together after dark, talking about their children and their work, and a friendship began to grow. Based on decades' worth of visits, phone calls, letters, and texts between Mary and Wendy, These Walls Between Us chronicles the two women's friendship, with a focus on what Wendy characterizes as her "oft-stumbling efforts, as a white woman, to see Mary more fully and to become a more dependable friend." The book examines obstacles created by Wendy's upbringing in a narrow, white, upper-class world; reveals realities of domestic service rarely acknowledged by white employers; and draws on classic works by the African American writers whose work informed and challenged Wendy along the way. Though Wendy is the work's primary author, Mary read and commented on every draft--and together, the two friends hope their story will incite and support white readers to become more informed and accountable friends across the racial divides created by white supremacy and to become active in the ongoing movement for racial justice. Geen bibliotheekbeschrijvingen gevonden. |
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 Google Books — Bezig met laden...GenresDewey Decimale Classificatie (DDC)305.800973Social sciences Social Sciences; Sociology and anthropology Groups of people Ethnic and national groups ; racism, multiculturalism General Biography And History North America United StatesLC-classificatieWaarderingGemiddelde: (5)
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There Sanford highlights the story of her repeated Nantucket encounters with her parents’ summer domestic servant Mary Norman—a poor, working-class African American woman about Sanford’s age from the Jim Crow South. Slowly and fitfully, she explores her years of perpetuating small, medium, and large aggressions and indignities against Norman, while also sharing their long journey to break through the social walls between them to become true friends across the boundaries of race and class. Sanford’s story is filled with telling examples of her journey—often made up of moving two steps forward and one step back—on the road to gaining insight into the social power dynamics that harmed and limited these two women who were from very different backgrounds, making real friendship between them almost impossible.
Yet that is not the end of the story. Through reading dangerously; becoming active in social justice movements; engaging with the best of her Quaker spirituality; learning about her own oppression; listening carefully to her supposed “inferior”; hearing Norman’s challenges; and reflecting deeply on their intertwined histories, differing social worlds, and complex experiences together, Sanford ultimately becomes capable of being a supportive and caring friend with Norman. Their early, warped relationship as “skilled, attentive server and sometimes conflicted beneficiary” ultimately heals and moves toward a more just and beneficial relationship over time. It is a moving journey." Steve Chase