BHM: P&P Live! Rebecca Carroll | SURVIVING THE WHITE GAZE with Nicole Chung
Feb 9, 2021 19:00
(GMT -4:00) Atlantic Time
Rebecca Carroll discusses her memoir, SURVIVING THE WHITE GAZE, with author Nicole Chung on P&P Live!
About this Event
This event is in partnership with The Meteor - a collective.
In Surviving the White Gaze, Rebecca Carroll grew up the only black person in her rural New Hampshire town. Adopted at birth by artistic parents who believed in peace, love, and zero population growth, her early childhood was loving and idyllic—and yet she couldn’t articulate the deep sense of isolation she increasingly felt as she grew older.
Everything changed when she met her birth mother, a young white woman, who consistently undermined Carroll’s sense of her blackness and self-esteem. Carroll’s childhood became harrowing, and her memoir explores the tension between the aching desire for her birth mother’s acceptance, the loyalty she feels toward her adoptive parents, and the search for her racial identity. As an adult, Carroll forged a path from city to city, struggling along the way with difficult boyfriends, depression, eating disorders, and excessive drinking. Ultimately, through the support of her chosen black family, she was able to heal.
Rebecca Carroll is host of the podcast Come Through with Rebecca Carroll, and a cultural critic at WNYC. She is the author of several interview-based books about race and blackness in America, including the award-winning Sugar in the Raw: Voices of Young Black Girls in America.
She'll be in conversation with Nicole Chung, the author of the nationally bestselling memoir All You Can Ever Know, which was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award, a semifinalist for the PEN Open Book Award, an Indies Choice Honor Book, and an official Junior Library Guild Selection.
The Meteor is guided (and inspired) by our collective: an advisory group of filmmakers, writers, organizers and artists doing great work across the media and arts universe. They are storytellers and solution-seekers, and they work in everything from documentary film to TikTok, but they share a commitment to moving the world forward against injustice. Get to know the initial group of founding members below.