Overview

"We strive for authenticity, but expediency often demands we suppress our true feelings. Dawn Downey struggles to find her genuine self, as she navigates her white surroundings. She wages an internal war, her intuition recognizing bigotry and her intellect wanting-needing-to deny it. At the end of any given day, she is angry. She is weary. She despairs. ""You get to hopeless by sinking,"" she tells us. ""I sank through dreamlike images of shackles, chains, branding irons, whips, ropes, nightsticks, burning crosses, and fire hoses. Bloodhounds on my trail, police dogs at my throat. I crashed through all the places that are supposed to be safe: school yards, lunch counters, courthouses, and church basements. From nigger to nigra to colored to negro to black to african-american and back again. Strange fruit. Centuries-old images absorbed from textbooks. Civil rights marches flickering across the family television. Labels, passed down from one generation to the next, labels meant to hold me apart, the other."" When a family member transforms a racist artifact, the act of redemption explodes her self-concept. She re-examines old beliefs, and on the other side of hopeless, discovers her Black power. Downey prompts us to consider how we find our authentic selves in the heart of our discomfort."

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9780996324076

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Reviews

"2022 Book of the Year Finalist (Government/Politics category) Independent Author Network ""... searing, painful, and insightful."" -- Steve Kraske, host of National Public Radio's Up to Date ""... highly recommended for anyone concerned about ... racism in America."" --Midwest Book Review Bookwatch ""... provocative, subtle, and captivating - often within the same breath."" ---Self-Publishing Review ""...eye-opening and chilling."" ---Readers' Favorite ""... sometimes humorous and always very real."" --Cheryl Wilfong, author, The Meditative Gardener "

Author Information

Dawn Downey writes essays about her everyday life-introspective stories to lift your spirits and challenge your assumptions. The question she strives to answer: how to be a sensitive elder woman of color in an insensitive, white-centered, male dominated, youth-oriented culture.With multiple WIPs vying for her attention, she's the author of essay collections Listicles, Blindsided, Searching for My Heart, From Dawn to Daylight, and Stumbling Toward the Buddha. Her publishing career began with a dance review in The Santa Barbara News Press. Since then, her essays have been featured in literary journals, magazines, and newspapers.Connecting with her readers, she blogs twice-weekly and also hosts Dawn's Monthly Author Reading on Zoom.When she's not writing she binge-watches Succession. Downey lives with her husband in Kansas City, Missouri.

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