Too White

Scholars have mapped out the stages through which white people come to understand their racial identity, but Kelly Norris did not think about those stages personally until she became a single mother raising a biracial son while teaching at a suburban school. For years she had wrestled with questions of identity and race in America, always asking what it meant for her to be white. Her first attempts to answer took the form of asking what it meant to be black.

This memoir follows a white woman as she sets out to examine the divide between races. The journey is by turns embarrassing, painful, and exhilarating. Norris faces racism directly and works toward an identity that is white and anti-racist.

Where academic writing on the subject stays theoretical, this book is personal. It records the motives, struggles, and realizations that come with developing a white identity.