Reviews for Black Girl/White Girl

The average rating for Black Girl/White Girl based on 2 reviews is 2 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2008-12-01 00:00:00 Chris Jeuell The title and book description are misleading. The book has very little to do with race relations, and more to do with the white girl's dysfunctional relationship with her politically controversial father and her own feelings of guilt. The characters are not at all likable, or even ones I could relate to or understand. The white girl tries obnoxiously hard to befriend her black roommate, who everyone else--including the other black students--finds intolerable. The white girl's fixation is rather obsessive, repulsive, and beyond comprehension. It continues despite obvious resentment from her roommate, who eventually becomes the target of anonymous racist acts. Since the novel is narrated by the white girl, who comes off as mentally unbalanced, I kept expecting at any moment it would reveal that she was actually stalking her roommate and committing the racist harassments herself. At what seems like an obvious stopping point, the narration continues and the black girl becomes more of a footnote than anything else; her death serves only as a catalyst, propelling the white girl towards an emotional breakdown in which she must finally face the truth about her father. The story isn't that compelling--it's just odd. The last part of the book doesn't even seem like it is written by the same character.

Review # 2 was written on 2017-10-27 00:00:00 Brian Payne Read for my American Postmodernism class. This is a novel that attempts to demonstrate and examine the American college experience for a person of colour, yet as a white author Oates is careful not to adopt a false voice on behalf of black college students, but instead writes from the perspective of a white girl sharing a dorm with a black girl. What follows is a juxtaposition of the two, working as both a contrast and bonding for the two characters who are aware of their societal differences, and let this become the basis for their encounters. I enjoyed this so much because I absolutely love campus novels, and only two chapters into the book I had already warmed to the voice and the setting. Yet studying this novel in light of my wider reading, which happened to be on structural and embedded racism in higher education, there was also a lesson to be taken from this which I value strongly in my continued interests in Black and African American literature. Whilst this is obviously not African American literature, it still adds something to the discourse of racism in American college education which is going continuously unnoticed as a result of the people who enforce it. After this I'd love to read more of Oates' work because I thoroughly enjoyed this novel. I would recommend for anybody interested in campus literature, and although it does attempt to be a part of the black experience narrative, I would recommend going straight to novels written by Black writers for a more stimulating look into that. Nevertheless, I wouldn't pass this book up because I'm really glad we were given this to read.