When I Was White
A Memoir
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Narrated by:
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Danielle Deadwyler
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By:
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Sarah Valentine
About this listen
The stunning and provocative coming-of-age memoir about Sarah Valentine's childhood as a White girl in the suburbs of Pittsburgh, and her discovery that her father was a Black man.
At the age of 27, Sarah Valentine discovered that she was not, in fact, the White girl she had always believed herself to be. She learned the truth of her paternity: that her father was a Black man. And she learned the truth about her own identity: mixed race.
And so Sarah began the difficult and absorbing journey of changing her identity from White to Black. In this memoir, Sarah details the story of the discovery of her identity, how she overcame depression to come to terms with this identity, and, perhaps most importantly, asks: why? Her entire family and community had conspired to maintain her White identity. The supreme discomfort her White family and community felt about addressing issues of race - her race - is a microcosm of race relationships in America.
A Black woman who lived her formative years identifying as White, Sarah's story is a kind of Rachel Dolezal in reverse, though her "passing" was less intentional than conspiracy. This memoir is an examination of the cost of being Black in America, and how one woman threw off the racial identity she'd grown up with, in order to embrace a new one.
©2019 Sarah Valentine (P)2019 Macmillan AudioListeners also enjoyed...
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- By: Karla Cornejo Villavicencio
- Narrated by: Karla Cornejo Villavicencio
- Length: 4 hrs and 53 mins
- Unabridged
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Writer Karla Cornejo Villavicencio was on DACA when she decided to write about being undocumented for the first time using her own name. It was right after the election of 2016, the day she realized the story she'd tried to steer clear of was the only one she wanted to tell. So she wrote her immigration lawyer's phone number on her hand in Sharpie and embarked on a trip across the country to tell the stories of her fellow undocumented immigrants—and to find the hidden key to her own.
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Raw, heartbreaking - we can do better by others
- By RapaciousReader on 04-11-20
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Ordinary Light
- A Memoir
- By: Tracy K. Smith
- Narrated by: Tracy K. Smith
- Length: 11 hrs and 6 mins
- Unabridged
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Tracy K. Smith has a fairly typical upbringing in suburban California: the youngest in a family of five children raised with limitless affection and a firm belief in God by a stay-at-home mother and an engineer father. But after spending a summer in Alabama at her grandmother's home, she returns to California with a new sense of what it means for her to be Black: from her mother's memories of picking cotton as a girl in her father's field for pennies a bushel to her parents' involvement in the Civil Rights Movement.
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Simply spoken - poetic
- By CarolynneRHarris on 04-27-15
By: Tracy K. Smith
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As I Knew Him
- My Dad, Rod Serling
- By: Anne Serling
- Narrated by: Anne Serling
- Length: 8 hrs and 15 mins
- Unabridged
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To Anne Serling, the imposing figure the public saw hosting The Twilight Zone each week, intoning cautionary observations about fate, chance, and humanity, was not the father she knew. Her fun-loving dad would play on the floor with the dogs, had nicknames for everyone in the family, and was apt to put a lampshade on his head and break out in song. He was her best friend, her playmate, and her confidant. After his unexpected death at 50, Anne, just 20, was left stunned.
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A Beautiful Tribute to a Wonderful Man
- By Becky on 04-12-20
By: Anne Serling
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Scars and Stilettos - 2nd Edition
- By: Harmony Dust
- Narrated by: Harmony Dust
- Length: 7 hrs and 12 mins
- Unabridged
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Scars and Stilettos: At 13, after being abandoned by her mother one summer and left to take care of her younger brother, Harmony becomes susceptible to a relationship that turns out to be toxic, abusive, and ultimately exploitative. She eventually finds herself working in a strip club at the age of 19, and her boyfriend becomes her pimp, controlling her every move and taking all of her money. Ultimately, she discovers a path to freedom and a whole new life.
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A religious book
- By Amazonbuyer on 10-12-21
By: Harmony Dust
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My Father's Paradise
- A Son's Search For His Family's Past
- By: Ariel Sabar
- Narrated by: Fajer Al-Kaisi
- Length: 12 hrs and 6 mins
- Unabridged
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In a remote corner of the world, forgotten for nearly 3,000 years, lived an enclave of Kurdish Jews so isolated that they still spoke Aramaic, the language of Jesus. Mostly illiterate, they were self-made mystics and gifted storytellers and humble peddlers who dwelt in harmony with their Muslim and Christian neighbors in the mountains of northern Iraq. To these descendants of the Lost Tribes of Israel, Yona Sabar was born.
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Great story, poorly narrated
- By Oren Kessler on 09-10-24
By: Ariel Sabar
What listeners say about When I Was White
Average customer ratingsReviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.
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- Lanay
- 08-10-19
Great book!
I honestly loved this book. Even the narrator was great. I think the only odd thing is the random length of the chapters.
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- Santa Fe Lady
- 08-15-19
Too long and repetitive
I was eager to read this story because the subject interested me. But now I am struggling to finish this book.
The narrator is terrible. She strings the sentences together and leaves no pauses where there should be one, adds pauses where there should NOT be one and makes a lot of it hard to follow.
The author beats the subject to death, over and over. I am trying to grasp her struggle and I have no doubt it was hard for her to learn that she had an African American father, but the book is just too long.
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1 person found this helpful
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- Robert R.
- 05-12-20
Enjoyable
Valentine offers her story in a captivating and delightful way that snares readers to want more. Her life, like most of ours, is filled with twist and turns she lays out in a relatable fashion. The only draw back is I was expect a better ending. Seems like she set it up for a future sequel.
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- Amazon Customer
- 11-07-19
Enjoyed reading about your life journey.
Loved it! Simply amazing. Very well written. Thank you for sharing your truth. I pray all of your questions about your life have been answered.
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- Carla
- 06-06-20
Amazing perspective
I highly recommend this book especially at this time. Sarah’s voice should not be ignored. Her brutal honesty makes teaches us about ourselves.
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- LisaJ
- 09-10-19
Not as good as interesting as I'd anticipated...
With my too being biracial (blk/wht), ethnically ambiguous, with a mother that raised me to tell "half truths" when asked my ethnicity, along with family that didn't hold their tongue w/regards to their bigotry/bias towards blacks as well as much of those I went to school with, also with having white half siblings that looked nothing like me, in addition to not knowing my father (in my case mine passed away shortly after my birth) and even had my own 'coming out' of sorts (much to the chagrin of some family members)...there were many relatable parts in her book. W/that being said, I wholeheartedly understand why she didn't know/ask until her twenties and it pains me to see the backlash she has experienced from the naysayers that can't remotely begin to relate let alone understand her not knowing. Anyway...my review.
Again, it was relatable in ways and those are the parts that really kept my attention. However, too much detail was given when not relevant to anything. Unfortunately, that was frequent. The narrator...well, she made it difficult to stay focused with her monotone reading, especially with some of her pronunciation of words.
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