Raceless
In Search of Family, Identity, and the Truth About Where I Belong
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Narrated by:
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Georgina Lawton
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By:
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Georgina Lawton
About this listen
From The Guardian’s Georgina Lawton, a moving examination of how racial identity is constructed - through the author’s own journey grappling with secrets and stereotypes, having been raised by White parents with no explanation as to why she looked Black.
Raised in sleepy English suburbia, Georgina Lawton was no stranger to homogeneity. Her parents were White; her friends were White; there was no reason for her to think she was any different. But over time her brown skin and dark, kinky hair frequently made her a target of prejudice. In Georgina’s insistently color-blind household, with no acknowledgement of her difference or access to Black culture, she lacked the coordinates to make sense of who she was.
It was only after her father’s death that Georgina began to unravel the truth about her parentage - and the racial identity that she had been denied. She fled from England and the turmoil of her home-life to live in Black communities around the globe - the US, the UK, Nicaragua, Cuba, the Dominican Republic, Vietnam, and Morocco - and to explore her identity and what it meant to live in and navigate the world as a Black woman. She spoke with psychologists, sociologists, experts in genetic testing, and other individuals whose experiences of racial identity have been fraught or questioned in the hopes of understanding how, exactly, we identify ourselves.
Raceless is an exploration of a fundamental question: What constitutes our sense of self? Drawing on her personal experiences and the stories of others, Lawton grapples with difficult questions about love, shame, grief, and prejudice, and reveals the nuanced and emotional journey of forming one’s identity.
©2020 Georgina Lawton (P)2020 HarperCollins PublishersListeners also enjoyed...
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The Ungrateful Refugee
- What Immigrants Never Tell You
- By: Dina Nayeri
- Narrated by: Dina Nayeri
- Length: 10 hrs and 33 mins
- Unabridged
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Aged eight, Dina Nayeri fled Iran along with her mother and brother and lived in the crumbling shell of an Italian hotel-turned-refugee camp. Eventually, she was granted asylum in America. She settled in Oklahoma, then made her way to Princeton University. In this book, Nayeri weaves together her own vivid story with the stories of other refugees and asylum seekers in recent years, bringing us inside their daily lives and taking us through the different stages of their journeys, from escape to asylum to resettlement.
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Amazing story of resilience and compassion
- By PAH on 09-06-19
By: Dina Nayeri
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Pregnant Girl
- A Story of Teen Motherhood, College, and Creating a Better Future for Young Families
- By: Nicole Lynn Lewis
- Narrated by: Nicky Sunshine
- Length: 7 hrs and 28 mins
- Unabridged
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An activist calls for better support of young families so they can thrive and reflects on her experiences as a Black mother and college student fighting for opportunities for herself and her child. Pregnant Girl presents the possibility of a different future for young mothers - one of success and stability - in the midst of the dismal statistics that dominate the national conversation.
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Political
- By Amazon Customer on 01-16-23
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Pages for You
- The Pages for You Series, Book 1
- By: Sylvia Brownrigg
- Narrated by: Abby Craden
- Length: 6 hrs
- Unabridged
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In a steam-filled diner in a college town, Flannery Jansen catches sight of something more beautiful than she's ever seen: a graduate student, reading. The 17-year-old, new to everything around her - college, the East Coast, bodies of literature, and the sexual flurries of student life - is shocked by her desire to follow this wherever it will take her.
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A gorgeous listen
- By MissLynn on 03-09-20
By: Sylvia Brownrigg
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Reclamation
- Sally Hemings, Thomas Jefferson, and a Descendant's Search for Her Family's Lasting Legacy
- By: Gayle Jessup White
- Narrated by: Karen Chilton
- Length: 9 hrs and 1 min
- Unabridged
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A Black descendant of Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings’ family explores America’s racial reckoning through the prism of her ancestors - both the enslaver and the enslaved.
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Slow start, eventually a worthwhile story
- By ChocolateDweller on 12-17-21
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American Baby
- A Mother, a Child, and the Shadow History of Adoption
- By: Gabrielle Glaser
- Narrated by: Kathe Mazur, Gabrielle Glaser, Margaret Katz
- Length: 10 hrs and 37 mins
- Unabridged
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The adoption business was founded on secrecy and lies. American Baby lays out how a lucrative and exploitative industry removed children from their birth mothers and placed them with hopeful families, fabricating stories about infants' origins and destinations, then closing the door firmly between the parties forever. Adoption agencies and other organizations that purported to help pregnant women struck unethical deals with doctors and researchers for pseudoscientific "assessments," and shamed millions of women into surrendering their children.
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I felt the love of my birth mom...
- By Mary H. on 02-03-21
By: Gabrielle Glaser
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Modern Loss
- Candid Conversation About Grief. Beginners Welcome.
- By: Rebecca Soffer, Gabrielle Birkner
- Narrated by: Meredith Mitchell, Josh Bloomberg
- Length: 7 hrs and 40 mins
- Unabridged
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At a time when we mourn public figures and national tragedies with hashtags, where intimate posts about loss go viral and we receive automated birthday reminders for dead friends, it's clear we are navigating new terrain without a road map. Let's face it: Most of us have always had a difficult time talking about death and sharing our grief. We're awkward and uncertain; we avoid, ignore, or even deny feelings of sadness; we offer platitudes; we send sympathy bouquets whittled out of fruit.
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Not What I Was Expecting
- By Bessie Mae on 03-01-23
By: Rebecca Soffer, and others
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This Close to Happy
- A Reckoning with Depression
- By: Daphne Merkin
- Narrated by: Suzanne Toren
- Length: 9 hrs and 32 mins
- Unabridged
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This Close to Happy is the rare, vividly personal account of what it feels like to suffer from clinical depression, written from a woman's perspective and informed by an acute understanding of the implications of this disease over a lifetime. Taking off from essays on depression she has written for The New Yorker and The New York Times Magazine, Daphne Merkin casts her eye back to her beginnings to try to sort out the root causes of her affliction.
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I should be the last person to recommend this book
- By Mariaposa on 03-04-17
By: Daphne Merkin
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The Song and the Silence
- A Story About Family, Race, and What Was Revealed in a Small Town in the Mississippi Delta While Searching for Booker Wright
- By: Yvette Johnson
- Narrated by: Robin Miles
- Length: 9 hrs and 42 mins
- Unabridged
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"Have to keep that smile", said Booker Wright in the 1966 NBC documentary Mississippi: A Self-Portrait. At the time Wright was a waiter in a Whites-only restaurant and a local business owner who would become an unwitting icon of the civil rights movement. For he did the unthinkable: Before a national audience, he described what life was truly like for the Black people of Greenwood, Mississippi.
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Exceeded every expectation
- By ZeeJ84 on 05-23-21
By: Yvette Johnson
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Unfollow
- A Memoir of Loving and Leaving the Westboro Baptist Church
- By: Megan Phelps-Roper
- Narrated by: Megan Phelps-Roper
- Length: 10 hrs and 17 mins
- Unabridged
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At the age of five, Megan Phelps-Roper began protesting homosexuality and other alleged vices alongside fellow members of the Westboro Baptist Church in Topeka, Kansas. Founded by her grandfather and consisting almost entirely of her extended family, the tiny group would gain worldwide notoriety for its pickets at military funerals and celebrations of death and tragedy.
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Insightful, honest and engaging
- By C.B.E. on 11-28-19
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The Inheritance
- A Novel
- By: JoAnn Ross
- Narrated by: Ann Marie Gideon
- Length: 11 hrs and 26 mins
- Unabridged
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When conflict photographer Jackson Swann dies, he leaves behind a conflict of his own making when his three daughters, each born to a different mother, discover that they’re now responsible for the family’s Oregon vineyard - and for a family they didn’t ask for.
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Great story a few little quirks
- By Dawn Starostka on 09-15-21
By: JoAnn Ross
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Say I'm Dead
- A Family Memoir of Race, Secrets, and Love
- By: E. Dolores Johnson
- Narrated by: Allyson Johnson
- Length: 7 hrs and 44 mins
- Unabridged
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Fearful of prison time - or lynching - for violating Indiana’s anti-miscegenation laws in the 1940s, E. Dolores Johnson's Black father and White mother fled Indianapolis to secretly marry in Buffalo. Her mother simply vanished, evading an FBI and police search that ended with the declaration to her family that she was the victim of foul play, either dead or sold into white slavery.
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Deeply meaningful important read
- By A.M.Rousseau on 12-21-21
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Autism in Heels
- The Untold Story of a Female Life on the Spectrum
- By: Jennifer Cook O'Toole
- Narrated by: Jennifer O'Toole
- Length: 12 hrs and 39 mins
- Unabridged
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This intimate memoir reveals the woman inside one of autism’s most prominent figures, Jennifer O'Toole. At the age of 35, Jennifer was diagnosed with Asperger's syndrome, and for the first time in her life, things made sense. Now, she exposes the constant struggle between carefully crafted persona and authentic existence, editing the autism script with wit, candor, passion, and power. Her journey is one of reverse-self-discovery not only as an Aspie but - more importantly - as a thoroughly modern woman.
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Somewhat relatable but not really.
- By M Bond on 02-26-23
What listeners say about Raceless
Average customer ratingsReviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.
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- Becca
- 03-03-21
Not was I was expecting after the Audible series
TL;DR - If you are looking for a book devoted solely to the individual and family dynamics involved in finding out your parentage is not what you've been told all your life, this is NOT that book. It opens and closes with that exploration, but the majority of the middle is spent detailing a journey to discover what it means to be Black, including traveling abroad and a good dose of political opinion thrown in. Still a very worthwhile listen if one adjusts their expectations to account for this, and realizes this is the author's personal story as she has felt she needed to tell it. A strictly genealogy book it is not - more a memoir in progress, well-told.
*****
I really enjoyed the Audible series, and it happens to be in my wheelhouse of research as I work towards my doctoral dissertation on an area closely related to the identity issue described in the series. I therefore pre-ordered this, and began listening that very first day.
To be clear, this is a story that the author needed to tell in her way, and to that end, I believe she did an admirable job.
I was under the impression that it would revolve around more of the family issues surrounding the lack of acknowledgement of the author's parentage. While this did occupy much of the initial chapters and the final couple of chapters, the middle section reflected the author's experience as a travel writer (which I have also done *fist bump*) and focused almost exclusively on the author's search for what it means to be Black. She travels to countries which have an element of being English-speaking, but are predominantly Black in population, and much of the middle of the book is about this journey.
As a semi-pro genealogist, I fully embrace people's need to tell their unique stories. As a former columnist, I chuckled while listening to descriptions of assignments and word counts. As a mental health professional, I listened with interest to how the therapists handled the different situations presented, and felt deeply the pain and confusion, the anger and sadness the author expressed over her newfound knowledge.
Having said that, this is also clearly a book of the times. Though the author is British, she makes references to then-current events in the USA, and at times I felt I needed to step away due to the overt sense of "Black power" and politics being expressed. In many cases, new identification with a group can lead to an "all-in" phase where everything is bigger, shiner, more urgent, and NEW.
Over time, this tends to mellow sonewhat for most people. I got the sense that this "shiny new reality" phase is where the author is right now, and her words and political views reflect that more directly now than they might a few years down the road. I do not necessarily disagree, although I do not share the fervor with which she presents this portion of the book.
However, I respect her story. I see her. I see her life, I see her journey as she has chosen to tell it. I was expecting - and hoping, quite frankly - for a book that spoke more about her ancestry and family relationships, including her newfound cousin.
These elements are quite definitely present, opening and closing the book. I could have taken a pass on the Black travelogue, but it too was well-done and captured the author's need to learn about this part of her identity and feel accepted and seen by others who looked like her.
Though she explicitly stated she wanted to go to English-speaking counties, she went to other places that are not known for as much English use. I found it incredible that she did not go to the country from which her biological father seems to have come from, even if only briefly and perhaps as part of a group trip with a translator if needed. I was also disappointed that her new DNA-matched cousin was barely a presence beyond the meeting that was recorded for the Audible series. I think there was actually more about her in the Audible series than there was in this book.
I did appreciate how the book closed the circle by returning home and working through a variety of these issues with her family at long last. I admire the strength her mother had/has to work through this, and the maturity the author has gained which is now allowing her to see her mother as a woman who lives her very much, and is - like everyone else - able to make mistakes and poor choices along the way, mixed in with the love and care amply provided in the home.
A satisfying conclusion to a work clearly still in progress. I could have done without the political fervor and activism, or at least liked it to have been toned down somewhat, but I honor and respect the sense the author often expressed that these were also elements of her personal journey.
A good listen overall, if not as closely related to the Audible series as I had thought it would be when I pre-ordered it.
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- Amazon Customer
- 09-21-21
I Feel Seen
I am so grateful for this book. I’m a busy, full-time working toddler mom and I still managed to devour this book in just two days. I didn’t want it to end. As a Black, biracial woman who grew up in a Black household and a white town, and who struggled (and struggles) with identity, and with race being a taboo topic within the family, I don’t know that I’ve ever felt more seen while reading a book. This book should be required reading for everyone, but especially for mixed race people, parents of kids of a difference race, adopters and adopted people, and those who have had their lives thrown into chaos by DNA testing. What a brave and beautiful story with unflinching truth and lots of light as well.
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- Amazon Customer
- 02-04-22
Excellent
This is relatable for those at the intersection of racial non-disclosure and societal denial or "let's play pretend and only see you as WE want to see you." Many of us struggle with finding ourselves and who we are in our mixedness.
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- Claudia B
- 05-11-22
Truth Behind Lies
Raceless by Georgina Lawton
Such an interesting story of a biracial girl growing up with her white family, firmly believing that she was white too.
Her exploration into her ancestry was thought provoking and brave.
I enjoyed her descriptive narrative, the places she visited and her experiences there.
I think this book would prove to be helpful to other people who were brought up to believe one thing about their race and to discover a different story as an adult.
Narration was good.
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- Jeanne F. Brooks
- 05-24-23
AN EXCELLENT INSIGHTFUL BOOK
Overall, this book was wonderful and the voice of the author was a great performance. As far as the story goes…I thoroughly enjoyed this audible (and the print version). My children are biracial, my husband black, our oldest son black (my husband’s whom I raised) and we have 16 grandchildren of a variety of hues from dark, African black to pale, Norwegian white! But aside from color, my husband was an oddball, middle child, in his family, a head taller than siblings and parents, and much darker. At 51 he learned that the man who raised him was not biologically his father. He had lived thru teasing and tormenting by neighborhood children and siblings, hinting at who they thought was his father, but until his mother confirmed it, he believed the lie, even searching out relatives of his dad who were taller with dark skin, believing he was a throwback! Thank you for this book. It gave us comfort to learn others feel similarly to learning truth.
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- K. Charles Lloyd
- 01-26-22
Hidden Identity in plain sight.
I enjoyed this book. Georgina shared her story of identity deception and the journey self discovery.
I was hoping that she elaborate further on the conversation with the family and more of her search for discovered relatives.
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- Miguel T
- 05-08-22
Passionate and well informed
Very informative and well paced. It’s a memoir written with journalistic rigor, but that feels like a novel, yet it is backed by science. Loved how the author takes the reader on a personal tour of her life and travels.
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- Vanessa Mac
- 04-12-22
was expecting a different story
I found the story to be interesting and well written. I was expecting more from the story. I thought she would go more in depth about her experiences and more of her relationship with her family.
Overall it’s a good story and different perspective on race. Worth reading.
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- Nicole Bartner
- 04-20-21
this is only sort of a memoir
the problem with this book is it is equal parts memoir and "instruction manual on being Black." so it's sort of not "useful" for anyone who actually knows about hair...you know?? I'm sure there are a lot of "white" people who need to read/listen to this book. I hope the author "circles back" when she is older and writes an actual memoir, minus all the instructional bits because her life and life/personal experiences are AMAZING and FASCINATING and INSPIRATIONAL and HILARIOUS. all the things
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- Ruth Knapp
- 06-30-24
The author’s anger
I was a little disappointed in the way the author dealt with her anger at her mother. I understand the shock of learning a family secret as my family has experienced something similar. Family secrets happen often and are sometimes held to protect the family as a whole - as in my case and the authors case. Like the author, our father had passed away before the secret was exposed and was unable to tell his side of the story. I’m not discounting that the authors feelings are real. It was just difficult to listen to when thinking of my own experience.
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