My First White Friend: Confessions On Race,Love,And Forgiveness - Hardcover

In words that are powerful and direct, but also richly hopeful, Raybon unearths a deep impulse to forgive her racial past. From her childhood in the arid "whiteness" of eastern Colorado, Raybon mastered the polite "grin of powerlessness", leaving her acceptable to white people but an angry stranger to herself. A quarter-century later, she realizes that her rage cannot be remedied by stoking her hate for whites, but by loving them, first by learning to love herself.

Patricia Raybon teaches journalism at the University of Colorado, Boulder.