Becky Thompson teaches African American Studies and Sociology at Wesleyan University. Sangeeta Tyagi is Director at the Exploration Summer Program, a curricular and co-curricular summer program for high school students.

"This is not a woe-is-me, tear-jerking collection: It is a dynamic call to action. The many different stories illuminate options, real possibilities for real people to develop strategies to navigate the racist shoals in today's shallow cultural waters. What makes this book groundbreaking are the ways in which the editors use personal stories to validate cultural theory." -- Middletown Press

• I: Blood Ties, Communal Relations; 1: “When we Are Capable of Stopping, We Begin to See”; 2: Mrs. Brent; 3: Red and Black in White America; 4: Writing in Search of a Home; 6: Alice's Little Sister; 6: Place and Kinship; II: Piecing Together History; 7: Locating Biafra; 8: Afro Images; 9: Time Traveling and Border Crossing; 10: A Hyphenated Identity; 11: Jews in the U.S; 12: Chattanooga Black Boy; III: Love Letters and Conversations; 13: My Dear Niece; 14: Oxydol Poisoning; 15: Wrting Life; 16: Birth of a Negation; 17: Jippin' the Furniture; IV: “Acts of Creation: Sweat, Blood, Bone“; The Breakdown of the Bicultural Mind; Eating Salt; Turning the Myths of Black Masculinity Inside/Out; “Wandering between Two Words, One Dead, the Other Powerless to Be Born”; Playing the Devil's Advocate; Black Women and the Wilderness; Toward the Light; Waiting for a Taxi