My Time Among the Whites: Notes from an Unfinished Education [Paperback]

From the author ofMake Your Home Among Strangers, essays on being an accidental Americanan incisive look at the edges of identity for a woman of color in a society centered on whiteness

In this sharp and candid collection of essays, critically acclaimed writer and first-generation American Jennine Cap? Crucet explores the condition of finding herself a stranger in the country where she was born. Raised in Miami and the daughter of Cuban refugees, Crucet examines the political and personal contours of American identity and the physical places where those contours find themselves smashed: be it a rodeo town in Nebraska, a university campus in upstate New York, or Disney World in Florida. Crucet illuminates how she came to see her exclusion from aspects of the theoretical American Dream, despite her familys attempts to fit in with white American culturebeginning with their ill-fated plan to name her after the winner of the Miss America pageant.

In prose that is both fearless and slyly humorous,My Time Among the Whitesexamines the sometimes hopeful, sometimes deeply flawed ways in which many Americans have learned to adapt, exist, andin the face of all signals saying otherwiseperhaps even thrive in a country that never imagined them here.

Jennine Cap? Crucetis the author of two previous books and is a contributing opinion writer for theNew York Times. Her novel,Make Your Home Among Strangers, was aNew York Times Book ReviewEditors' Choice book, the winner of the 2016 International Latino Book Award, and was cited as a best book of the year by NBC Latino, theGuardian, and theMiami Herald; it has been adopted as an all-campus read at over twenty-five American universities. Her short stories have been honored with the Iowa Short Fiction Award, an O. Henry Prize, and other awards. Raised in Miami, Florida, she is an associate professor in the Department of English and the Institute forlƒF