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    How I Shed My Skin: Unlearning the Racist Lessons of a Southern Childhood
    How I Shed My Skin: Unlearning the Racist Lessons of a Southern Childhood
    How I Shed My Skin: Unlearning the Racist Lessons of a Southern Childhood
    Audiobook7 hours

    How I Shed My Skin: Unlearning the Racist Lessons of a Southern Childhood

    Written by Jim Grimsley

    Narrated by Henry Leyva

    4/5

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    About this audiobook

    In August of 1966, Jim Grimsley entered the sixth grade in the same public school he had attended for the five previous years, in his small eastern North Carolina hometown. But he knew that the first day of this school year was going to be different: for the first time he'd be in a classroom with black children. That was the year federally mandated integration of the schools went into effect, at first allowing students to change schools through "freedom of choice," replaced two years later by forced integration.

    For Jim, going to one of the private schools that almost immediately sprang up was not an option: his family was too poor to consider paying tuition, and while they shared the community's dismay over the mixing of the races, they had bigger, more immediate problems to contend with.

    Now, over forty years later, Grimsley, a critically acclaimed novelist, revisits that school and those times, remembering his own personal reaction to his first real exposure to black children and to their culture, and to his growing awareness of his own mostly unrecognized racist attitudes. Good White People is both true and deeply moving, an important work that takes readers inside those classrooms and onto the playing fields as, ever so tentatively, alliances were forged and friendships established.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherHighbridge Company
    Release dateApr 14, 2015
    ISBN9781622315734
    How I Shed My Skin: Unlearning the Racist Lessons of a Southern Childhood
    Author

    Jim Grimsley

    Jim Grimsley was born in rural eastern North Carolina and was educated at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Jim's first novel, Winter Birds,/i>, won the Sue Kaufman Prize for best first novel from the American Academy of Arts and Letters and was a finalist for the PEN/Hemingway Award. He has published other novels, including Dream Boy, Kirith Kirin, and My Drowning. His books are available in Hebrew, German, French, Spanish, Dutch, and Portuguese. He has also published a collection of plays and most recently a memoir, How I Shed My Skin. His body of work as a prose writer and playwright was awarded the Academy Award in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters in 2005. For twenty years he taught writing at Emory University in Atlanta.

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    Reviews for How I Shed My Skin

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    • 5/5
      Ursula please write a book!
    • 5/5
      As an anti-racism activist, I am an avid reader of all books by white people who believe in sharing their awakenings and the actions they take to denounce their own prejudices. This one is even more intense because Jim Grimsley is a fine, fine writer who is also a hemophiliac and gay. He grew up in rural Eastern North Carolina and was one of the first students to attend an integrated high school in his community.Jim believes that his disease, which prevented him from engaging in typical rough play and sports, separated him from the other white boys in his classes, as well causing his categorization as a "sissy". This enabled him to become more friendly with girls, who seemed to be less likely to become involved in fights with black kids in his small town (of course, the fact that whites and blacks lived completely separate lives helped, too - churches, stores, restaurants - were not integrated until 1968) and a bit less racist.Grimsley's vivid descriptions of his schooling, his life of poverty due to his father's alcoholism, and his very slow lessons learned about the similarities between him and the black children in his classes are remarkable and will throw most readers back into their own daily school lives. In Jim's high school, the tracking of black students into less academically rigorous classes was mitigated somewhat since many of his white classmates had been removed from the public schools to avoid integration, and attended private "academies", mostly run by white churches. As he made his way through, times changed and "hippies" of both colors hung out together in the smoking area and even dated secretly.This is a remarkable tale told with amazing awareness of the complete influence parents and the churches had over the children's blossoming minds - and how simple it was to create a new generation of racists. These are the same people who today "don't see color" "don't care if you're green, pink, or purple" and want you to "stop making everything about race". But not Jim. As he said, he did take a far and admirable journey to shed much of the racist skin of his childhood. A must read for anyone trying to figure out what the hell is going on in this country, and why it's so slow to change.
    • 4/5
      When I originally looked up the book, I found that it was written by a white man; so, in a way, I was confused. I read the story and began to feel a sense of personal connection. I grew up in a society where white people were dominant in a sense. This book has some biased point of views but was good overall. It showed the growing up of a white man who had rasism all around him. All around, it was a good book and I recommend reading it.
    • 3/5
      In "How I Shed My Skin" Jim Grimsley looks back at his growing up as both a gay man and as a white man going to an intergrated school for the first time. Not only does he talk honestly and deeply about where we as a country have been but also how far we still have to go.