Black Girl, White Girl - Book Review

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students creating very socially awkward situations. This is something that raised some questions to me while reading Joyce’s book. It made me think would Genna continuous push to be friends with Minette if she was White? For me personally, I believe that she would not try to force a friendship on her if she was White.

When looking at the many different topics that were discussed in class and that were also in this book were very common. For an example, within the book hate crimes were something that was discussed and also demonstrated on Minette. Within class, we discussed the types of hate crimes that many people showed toward minority groups. Hate crimes is something that sweeps the streets every single day. While reading an article from class,“Latest Hate Crime Statistics Released”, showed some statistics of the hate crimes that were taking place in 2015. The biggest reason behind hate crimes were race/ethnicity/ancestry bias, resulting in 59.2%. Within our society now, the minority group that is targeted is Muslims. The F.B.I reported that the attacks against American Muslims have increased since previous years, which created an overall increase in hate crimes for all groups (Lichtblau, 2016). When looking at this book, I thought about the Ted lecture where Chimamanda Adichie was telling us about “The Single Story” (Adichie, 2009). When she was telling us how her roommate believed what she was told about Africa and only believed that single story. This is something that I believe was common within the book. Many people hated Minette and acted racist towards her because of her skin color. So, because of her skin color she was targeted, simply because of the preconceived notion of Black people without actually knowing her. Another topic that was discussed within class that I found to used within the book would be the ultimate attribution error. This is where the behavior of a single minority group member will influence how members of an entire group is viewed (Scacco, 2017). While looking at the time frame of when the incidents were taken place, this is something that was very common. Since the hate crimes were happening on the campus, instead of the students knowing Minette for who she was, they believed that all Blacks were bad. This created her to be the target of hate crimes on campus as well due to the color of her skin.

This was a very powerful story that I really enjoyed reading this book; however, I wish we saw more of Minette’s side. I learned a lot about this book and writing this paper because it shows how to connect class material to literally everything that we experience, especially a class that discusses prejudices to show that even though it was common long ago, it is still something that we face in society too. This has taught me that racism is something that will never really go away until we understand the experiences that one has witness and how that makes them the person they truly are. We were taught before to “not judge a book by its cover” and even though it is such a cliche quote, it is something that we need to constantly remind ourselves about. It is not fair to judge people off their skin tone because we are so much more than the melanin in our skin, we are ALL the same at the end of the day!

Reference Page

Adichie, Chimamanda. (2009, July). The danger of a single story

Scacco, Linda. (2017). Social Categorization and Stereotypes [Powerpoint slides]

Scacco, Linda. (2017). The Experience of Discrimination [Powerpoint slides].