Actually, a lot. Being white you probably don’t think about your skin color often. If you do, you have the assurance it is the norm, or the best.
My connection to color prejudice comes mostly from high school. I was one of the few white students at Hyde Park High, on the South Side of Chicago, in the 1960’s. In my school there were six tracks - dumbest to brightest by the school’s assessment - and the darkest kids were in the lowest tracks.
Big Bad Beautiful Brown came about when I was working with my friend Charlotte Sherman. Charlotte and I met online in 2009 when I contributed to her Kickstarter - she hoped to fund a trip to Mississippi to do research for a book she was writing.
When I was little I was always secreting things in my room. They were the sort of things Boo Radley left for Scout: broken watches, little carvings, medals, bits of ribbon. I kept them in boxes and labeled them. Organizing was a way to have control and create order in a chaotic childhood…
