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by Jim Grimsley (Author)
Critically acclaimed novelist Jim Grimsley looks back at the federally mandated racial integration of his school in 1966, remembering his own first real encounters with black children and their culture. The result is a true and moving personal narrative of race relations.
Front Jacket
. . . Good people taught and still teach racism to their children without a second thought. This was true in the South of my birth and remains so to the present . . . We teach that God created the races to be separate from one another for a purpose, and we preach that this purpose cannot be to mix, because why then would He have created the separation in the first place? We teach that when people are different from each other, one is better and the other worse . . . We teach that black and white are not simply different but opposite. --from How I Shed My Skin
"Race has been at the forefront of the national conversation . . . The country is discussing how far we still have to go. How I Shed My Skin, by Jim Grimsley, is a white writer's story of that journey--where we've come from and how we move forward." --The Washington Post "Grimsley says, 'I was a good little racist' . . . It's the defining moment in Grimsley's new memoir about desegregation, a day when he sensed that everything he'd been taught about black people was wrong." --The Atlanta Journal-Constitution "Powerful . . . Grimsley's brave self-examination of his own childhood prejudices makes this book personal; his struggle to reconcile and overcome those prejudices makes it universal." --Birmingham magazine "Grimsley impersonates his younger self with great skill and delicacy . . . He doesn't pretend that simply sitting next to black classmates suddenly changed his way of looking at the world . . . The process occurred over many years and much searching." --The New York Times Book Review "Eloquent, moving . . . A welcome addition to our constant, ever-evolving conversation on race." --Atlanta magazine
