ABSTRACT
I want to start with a tale of two white girls – Sandra Laing from Mpumulanga in South Africa and Bliss Broyard who was raised in the blue-blood world of Connecticut’s twee suburbs and private schools. Broyard’s racial identity was ensconced in the comfort of insular whiteness that had always known there were ‘others’ but never really considered them. In her book, One Drop, she confesses:
I’d never had a conversation about race. In the world I was raised in, it was considered an impolite subject . . . Although I grew up within an hour’s drive of three of the poorest black communities in the United States . . . those neighbourhoods seemed as distant as a foreign country.
