WHITE BOY

Graves recounts his efforts to address his racist upbringing and outlines his fascination with black culture.

“I am from a racist family” is the stark opening line of this tell-all about seeking sexual and professional fulfillment. Growing up in Memphis in the 1950s and 1960s, Graves (English/LeMoyne-Owen College; Aesop's Fables with Colin Hay, 2017, etc.) felt the notion of white superiority “was in the very air we breathed.” As a boy, he knew that black people lived in slums and had their own water fountains and exclusive days at the zoo. He didn’t get to know any black people, though, until his school integrated when he was 11. In the years to come, Graves was increasingly drawn to African American culture, researching the African origins of blues music. He also had sex with multiple black women, who appear to be racially fetishized (“a bevy of brown-skinned beauties”). After an unfulfilling 23-year marriage to a white woman, he writes, “I wanted to make up for what I considered lost time,” and “black women seemed to find me more attractive and interesting.” He met Fatima Magoro, from Sierra Leone, through Match.com. Despite his uneasiness over her inconsistent accounts of her past, he got her a fiancee visa for the U.S. Her existing pregnancy by another man nearly derailed the relationship, but after Fatima’s abortion they proceeded with a volatile relationship that lasted six years. The book’s sudden ending positions this experience as the pivotal one of the author’s life: “I will never know if she truly loved me,” he laments in conclusion. His experience of teaching seventh-grade creative writing makes for lively material, breaking up what can otherwise be a slightly dull chronological tour through the author’s life story. A classroom setting that initially appeared to be “the third circle of hell” gradually became a place where he had meaningful everyday encounters with minority students. Unfortunately, the overall effect here is a cataloging of black women's physical features that reads like racial stereotyping.

The book’s erotic focus is a prolonged objectification of black women.