65 pages • 2 hours read
Winona Guo, Priya VulchiTell Me Who You Are: Sharing Our Stories of Race, Culture, & Identity
Nonfiction | Book | Adult | Published in 2021A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Epigraph-IntroductionChapter Summaries & Analyses
Epigraph-Introduction Summary
Content Warning: The source material reproduces “the n-word” and other racial slurs, as well as offensive terms related to ability. It also contains discussion of slavery, lynching, sexual assault, and suicide.
The book begins with a Cherokee adage: “In our traditional way of life, we believe that I don’t tell you who you are. You tell me who you are, and that is who you are” (ix).
The Introduction explains the motivation behind the book, beginning with the authors’ recognition that their school did not teach them about racial issues, even as they faced prejudice and racism as Asian American students. After the 2014 police killing of Eric Garner, their sophomore history teacher brought up race, prompting their journey toward learning about the topic. They began interviewing people from all races and walks of life in their hometown of Princeton, New Jersey, asking them, “What does the word ‘race’ mean to you?” (2). They created the racial literacy organization CHOOSE to relate these stories online and teach people about racial literacy. They became speakers at schools, produced teaching resources, and held a TED Talk, “What It Takes to Be Racially Literate.”
Prompted by a tweet from their professor, Ruha Benjamin, they realized that the stories they collected and shared online needed research and statistical support. Benjamin said that racial literacy is more than a “‘conversation on race’—which too often stays at the level of anecdote and sentiment. Racial literacy is developing a historical & sociological tool kit to understand how we got here and how it could’ve been/CAN BE otherwise” (2). The book’s combination of stories and research is meant to aid people’s knowledge of race by facilitating both compassion for individuals and an understanding of structural racism.
As high school juniors, the authors wrote a racial literacy textbook (The Classroom Index) that included stories from people in New Jersey and New York City. However, they soon realized that they needed to interview people across the US. This compelled them to take a gap year to travel the US from Anchorage, Alaska, in 2017 to Charlottesville, Virginia, in 2018. They gathered more than 500 stories based on the question “How has race, culture, or intersectionality impacted your life?” (3)—a question they quickly found got at the core of people’s sense of self.
The book presents about 100 interviews with people from a variety of backgrounds, ranging from all-white rural communities, to segregated and diverse communities, to communities with mostly people of color. The authors note that race impacts all towns and cities across the US and that even diverse communities often have racial divisions in housing and resources. They emphasize intersectionality and creating change through discussion of their own experiences, the stories of interviewees, and their research, although they acknowledge that the book illustrates a limited portrait of race in the US, showing only their journey to this point and their continuing need to learn. They also acknowledge that the stories are merely snapshots and do not reflect the complete identities of the interviewees.
A section after the introduction, “A Brief History of Whiteness,” briefly traces this history. Drawing on Racial Domination, Racial Progress by Matthew Desmond and Mustafa Emirbayer, the discussion outlines the different ways people have discriminated against others throughout history, includes background on the development of nationalism and capitalism, and considers the impact of colonialism on race. It illustrates how nationalism, capitalism, and colonialism combined to create indentured servitude and slavery and contends that African people were chosen for enslavement not because of their “race” but for various “practical” reasons: their noticeable skin color, limited knowledge of the Americas, and immunity to diseases from Europe. The result was a Blackness-whiteness dichotomy, with whiteness becoming the “norm.”
A brief discussion of race follows, from the same source. It defines race as a social construct rather than a biological reality. It enumerates the different racial groups in the US and four levels of racism (as defined by Race Forward: The Center for Racial Justice Innovation): internalized (racism in private belief), interpersonal (racism in interactions with others), institutional (inequities in individual institutions and systems of power), and systemic (racism that occurs across societal institutions).
Epigraph-Introduction Analysis
The book’s structure and tone spotlight the interviewees rather than the authors, who limit discussion of their experiences to the Introduction and later chapter introductions. They only introduce the interviews through photos of the interviewees and a few quick facts (e.g., about their location), which allows the interviewees to speak for themselves and describe (or sometimes leave out) their race, occupation, education, family background, etc. The authors also do not fill in missing information or add information when an interviewee jumps from topic to topic, and the interviews consist of stories without any interrupting questions. This heightens the sense that the interviewees are speaking for themselves and telling their own stories.
These choices support the authors’ overall goal to foreground others’ experiences of race and identity. Each chapter topic is a component of racial literacy, from understanding how race impacts everything to taking action. The choice to highlight interviewees’ voices parallels the theme of Stories, Language, and Conversations About Race and Identity as well as one of the Epilogue’s “conversational norms”: “Speak your truth” (5). In keeping with this, the authors maintain the terms the interviewees use to describe their identity rather than ascribing labels to them. The Epigraph mirrors this focus on others’ voices, as it emphasizes that no one else can define one’s identity; it is up to the individual to share and construct their identity through their words.
The book presents people of diverse races, ages, genders, and backgrounds, but not everyone is represented, which the authors acknowledge: “First, this book does not reflect a complete or definitive picture of race in America, and it is not meant to. This book reflects a personal journey” (5-6). It is the authors’ journey through racial literacy, shared as an example for others, and a sampling of the diverse identities that exist in America. Because the journey through racial literacy is complex, as people’s lives are, some chapter themes bleed into other chapters and some interviewees discuss topics beyond the chapter theme.
The brief footnotes that accompany each interview add information about a topic, term, or statistic that the interviewee mentioned; they emphasize facts, history, and definitions, again removing the authors’ opinions and voice and foregrounding research to supplement stories.
The Introduction is the only section that highlights the authors’ experiences in depth, but it does so only to share their motivation for writing the book and promoting racial literacy. It introduces their concept of racial literacy from an intersectional perspective, while the other preliminary sections serve as a primer for the remainder of the book. Together, this introductory material sets the stage for the subsequent stories.
