The XX Factor: Slate women blog about politics, etc...

The Color of Hopelessness

Guess I’m a rube, too, Hanna. When David started the e-mail thread at Slate calling BS on Seltzer’s “memoir,” I had the sneaking suspicion that folks were quick to denounce the book’s veracity out of the notion that a white girl couldn’t possibly be raised in a black foster family or have experienced the stuff that Margaret Seltzer said she had. No doubt David and others saw fakery in aspects of the story aside from her skin color. I, too, thought she was playing up the lingo and lifestyle for effect—the gangster recuperating from a gunshot wound on her couch was a bit much, and the pit-bull tattoo, well. Still, that didn’t prove that the writer hadn’t spent her adolescence in South Central running drugs for thugs. Assuming that a white girl wouldn’t be placed in an inner-city neighborhood with a black foster family is folly. My black aunt took in plenty of white kids, from toddlers to teens, during many years as a foster mother. There's a thorny presumptuousness behind the mind-set of how could a white kid possibly get stuck in such a hopeless life! In reality, a white girl could be placed in a housing project in Compton or a trailer park in Riverside. She could wind up slinging crack or meth. Both scenarios are feasible, even if they don’t apply to Margaret, and hopelessness knows no skin color.