Last weekend I read with great interest this article in the NYTimes, about this white woman with a very nice house in Eugene, OR who wrote a memoir about being a South Central gang-banger and foster child in a black family. (My gut instinct was that the State of California wouldn't place a white child with a black family but I couldn't actually verify that) I found her situation to be kind of weird--this white woman with the quintessential middle-class house with a white kid who just happened to have run drugs and sold pit bulls for the Bloods? She and her daughter look like a pair of indie kids! Still, because it was in the Times, I assumed that however weird this situation looked, it was true.
Still, the OGL gave Ms. Jones's book a glowing review. Today, an article appeared that her older sister ratted her out--none of it was true. She grew up with her white biological family and went to (gasp!) private school (hell, I went to high school in the ghetto and that is verifiable!). She did some sort of volunteer/outreach thing with the gang people of South Central.
What irritated me the most was not that she made the whole thing up. I spend my days making shit up, and my desire to see my made-up shit published and sold in bookstores borders on the psychotic. It was that the publishing powers that be overlooked countless gifted writers who really are from this community and background, and decided to bestow the mantle of gang-banger authority on a white, college-educated homeowner rather than A REAL BLACK PERSON. Because a white woman had some outsider/anthropologist cache, she was taken seriously, handed a publishing contract, and got two huge write-ups in the Times. I'm sure there are some literate Bloods out there.
I'm also left wondering how she got away with this. Like stealing from an archives, you're gonna get caught. It's not as if she doesn't have friends, old classmates, family members, etc. who knew she was making it all up.
Posted by Zerd at March 4, 2008 12:09 AMMy aunt (white) was placed with a black foster family, though this was in the 60s or 70s and it happened in the Northeast.
I don't understand why these authors are passing off their work as memoir. It's not like there's no market for fiction.
Posted by: April at March 4, 2008 09:19 AM