"All my life I have passed invisibly into the white world, and all my life I have felt that sudden and alarming moment of consciousness there, of remembering I am black. It may feel like emerging too quickly from deep in the ocean, or touching an electric fence, or like a deer paralyzed in the headlights of an oncoming car", writes Toi Derricotte, a light-skinned black woman.

This book began as sketchy journal entries over twenty years ago when the author moved into an all-white neighborhood near New York City. "I believed that my unconsciousness of my blackness, my 'forgetting, ' was symptomatic of some deep refusal of 'self, ' a kind of death wish.... I wanted to capture the language of self-hate, the pain of re-emerging thought and buried memory and consciousness". Here the author describes encounters with family, neighbors, friends, and colleagues where she is forced to question what it means to be a black woman living in a racially divided world.

The result is a brilliant and painful document, a meditation about the complexity of race in this country. It is also a book about uncovering the denied and shameful aspects of the self, and the author's journey toward self-acceptance.