'The Black Girl Next Door' by Jennifer Baszile
BOOK REVIEW
Memoir reveals an upper-middle-class family's struggle when assimilation is only on the surface.
In a book world cluttered with memoirs driven more by look-at-me indulgence than a need to say something significant, Jennifer Baszile's "The Black Girl Next Door" stands out. Baszile is a Yale history professor who grew up black and upper middle class in the South Bay enclave of Palos Verdes; her book tells the story of that life.
Palos Verdes may not be as well known as Beverly Hills or Malibu, but it's every bit as exclusive -- meaning, every bit as white. In the late 1970s, Baszile's family was one of the few black families in the neighborhood, a scenario that's become familiar in American social history.
It's common to frame this as a positive, equating it with black upward mobility and the triumph of the civil rights movement. But there's a troubling complement to the picture, rarely told, which Baszile presents in emotional and urgent detail.
Her mostly losing battle to fit in reminds us that the "only one" syndrome -- being the only black at school and other social settings -- continued long after the days of the movement and in many instances still holds.
Baszile updates the story by examining how isolation and alienation amid success shaped her life; she lays bare the turmoil beneath the stiff-upper-lip endurance that tends to define black narratives about overcoming in white society.
Baszile and her family are not overcoming, they've arrived. Theirs is a black story less about resistance than compliance. But it's a fresh hell: how to comply with a community that won't have you, ignores you or only accepts you 20% of the time?
"The Black Girl Next Door" isn't great literature. Baszile's prose can be clunky and lapse into cliché; sometimes she overworks a metaphor, as when she lingers on the meaning of a black girl like her working at a local Kentucky Fried Chicken.
But her forthrightness and courage in other places more than make up for that. Her poignant struggles with ordinary concerns like friendships and romance make clear that for all the progress made in race relations, there are a lot of gray areas even -- or especially -- at the top of the hill where money is supposed to wipe out racial difference.
It doesn't. Baszile loves the sunsets and the ocean air of the Pacific, but as she moves up the social scale, the beauty is quickly compromised. Her family wakes up one morning to find a stone cherub on their courtyard fountain marred by blackface; someone scrawls "Go Home Niggers" on the front sidewalk.
