145Y: Nonfiction book on racism for preteens

This could easily be post-1990, but not post-2006. It’s a thin hardcover – maybe no more than 60 pages – presumably meant for school libraries. One striking anecdote I remember was about how racism doesn’t have to be taught through words. In it, a white Southern woman, probably born in the 1950s, told how her mother was an impeccable lady and also “quite a racist.” However, the mother never said an unkind word about any person based on that person’s skin color, because “she was too much of a lady for that.” Even so, every time the mother and her daughter went shopping and had to talk to a black cashier or sales employee, the mother used a tone of voice as if she were talking to a silly preschooler. So, wrote the daughter, (not verbatim) “she passed on her racist views to me without a single word being exchanged between us on the subject!”

 

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