About Me

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I was the white girl. There had always been Black children in my class, but only a few, and we played together without me thinking much about it. Until sixth grade. I was bused to a school I’d never heard of, that was in a neighborhood I’d never been to. On the first day of school the principal gathered the white students who’d shown up into the hall. He redivided us into classes so that there’d be at least two white children in each class. I don't think I was scared. 

I think I was lonely.

For two and a half years the four children in my family were sent to schools not of our choosing. Our lives changed drastically: socially, academically, culturally. 

My parents vacillated between their duty as parents and their duty as citizens. In the end, they sold their home and moved us out of the city.

I graduated from my nearly all white high school, and from my nearly all white college. The busing experience was a blip in my past until I returned to Richmond as a teacher thirty years later. The demographics of the city had become even more lopsided. The condition of the city schools had families flocking to the Title 1 private school where I taught. This is where my reflection began. How could this part of our society not have progressed in the time I’d been gone? How could the schools that had bused to integrate be even more segregated? The flawed education cycle for the children I taught had very narrow escape routes.

What began as a personal reflection became a deep dive into Richmond history. What started as a way to understand the issues my students were facing became a revealing of my own privilege. My growing awareness of racism embedded in systems and policy turned into a developing consciousness of what it means to be white.

Hey, White Girl is a work of fiction. It’s a reimagining. It’s a personal journey. It’s a compilation of stories and memories and dreams. 

I hope it is the beginning of a reckoning.

I wouldn't have identified myself as a writer fifteen years ago, even though  I now realize I've always written. I've journaled most of my life; it's how I figure out my world. As a child I wrote poems and stories and plays. As a teenager I started a now nearly archaic habit of writing letters to friends, hundreds of them over the years.  But I never thought all those words on the 

page counted as real writing.

But the writing habit became a path for figuring out myself. Way past my college days I started taking classes with assignments and deadlines and critique groups. At the same time I changed jobs and started teaching in a school that challenged everything I thought I knew about education. The personal exploration and the writing practice collided and I realized I had a story to tell.

We all do. 

Some tell their story through art, music, dance, or film.  Some  live their stories and we are inspired by them, or grieved by them.  I see stories everywhere. Unique, worthy, often overlooked tales of being human. We become better people when we learn the stories of others, when we listen or read well. 

My hope is to use the pen to craft stories that make us pay attention, that nudge us towards compassion.

Thank you for taking this journey with me.