Crossing the Color Line
Readings in Black and White
edited by Suzanne W. Jones

Description:

The complex truth about the color line -- its destructive effects, painful legacy, clandestine crossings, possible erasure -- is revealed more often in private than in public and has sometimes been visited more easily by novelists than historians. In this tradition, Crossing the Color Line, a powerful collection of nineteen contemporary stories, speaks the unspoken, explores the hidden, and voices both fear and hope about relationships between blacks and whites.

The volume opens with stories by Alice Adams, Toni Cade Bambara, Ellen Douglas, Reynolds Price, Ekwueme Michael Thelwell, and John Williams that focus on misunderstandings created by racial stereotypes and by mislabeling cultural differences. In a second group of stories, Anthony Grooms, Randall Kenan, James Alan McPherson, Toni Morrison, Frances Sherwood, Alice Walker, and Joan Williams examine situations that promote understanding, even when relationships between blacks and whites are complicated by charged issues of politics, religion, class, gender, and sexual orientation.

The final section features recent stories that turn on personal similarities as often as racial differences, but even here the legacy of racism lingers. It tests the emerging friendship of Alyce Miller's women, the professional relationship of David Mean's men, the alliances between Cliffor Thompson's college students, the romance of Reginald McKnight's interracial couple, and the business venture between Elizabeth Spencer's white woman and black man. Much of the power and poignancy of these recent stories, however, comes from the possibility that equal and amiable relationships can, and do, cross the color line.

Crossing the Color Line
Readings in Black and White
edited by Suzanne W. Jones

ISBN: 9781570033766
ISBN-10: 1570033765
Publisher: University of South Carolina Press
Publication Date: 2000
Format: Trade Paperback, 292 pages
Book Type: New Bargain Book
Condition: New, Has remainder mark

Bargain books may be overstocks (remainders) or publisher returns. These books are new, not used, but may have a mark (usually a line or a dot) on the top or bottom edge. Some may also exhibit slight shelf wear.