New Book By UB Law Professor Explores Her Life As A "White" Black Woman

BUFFALO, N.Y. -- Judy Scales-Trent, professor of law at the University at Buffalo, is a light-skinned black woman whose new book, "Notes of a White Black Woman" (1995, Penn State Press), describes a painful and hidden part of the black experience in America.

Able to "pass" as white but determinedly black, Scales-Trent explores what it is like to live simultaneously inside and outside of both black and white communities in the no-man's land that has both challenged and defined her sense of self.

Scales-Trent was raised in Winston-Salem, N.C., and then New York City in a professional, middle-class family with a strong and well-articulated black heritage. Her great-grandfather was white, however, and from him she inherited the light skin that caused her to "look white" and to spend a lifetime questioning the validity of discrete racial categories.

The book begins with excerpts from a diary she began in the 1970s, in which she describes the guilt she felt at not being "black enough," particularly when white people -- not realizing her racial heritage -- used racial slurs in front of her.

When her observations in this regard were published in the Yale Journal of Law and Feminism more than 20 years ago, her essay became a cult hit. She's been developing a series of essays on such subjects since 1989, because, she says, she thinks it important to explore how one works through the problematic identity issues created for light-skinned blacks by the American experience.

In "Notes of a White Black Woman," the author does so first by analyzing the social construction of race in the United States and the power of racial categories in our personal lives.

She describes racial purity laws, for instance, and how they have operated over 400 years of U.S. history. She demonstrates how these laws and the arbitrary racial categories that spawned them have profoundly influenced the lives of those they were designed to define and control. She examines, as well, how race and color affect relationships within families, between men and women in the African-American community and in the community-at-large.

She further illuminates the discussion with stories from her own life. She describes how she always wondered whether she confronted the same kind of job or housing discrimination as other blacks because she could "pass" as white without intending to do so. And, although rejected in some respects by the black community because of her light color, she describes how she confronted anger and bigotry when she insisted upon her black identity to whites who had mistaken her for one of their own.

These and similar experiences have led Scales-Trent to an interest in just what is meant by "race," since race itself is not and cannot be defined simply in terms of "color." She concludes that one can be black and white at the same time, that "race" does and does not exist. That is to say that race exists, not so much as a discrete biological entity (as proven by the vast numbers of mixed-race individuals), but as a powerful social construction. In that sense, says Scales-Trent, "Boy, does it exist!"

In this painful, intelligent, humor-filled book, Scales-Trent celebrates the richness of her bi-cultural heritage, the experience of straddling two worlds as a "white" black American and discusses how she has revised her teaching methods to offer a multicultural education to her law students.

Scales-Trent is the daughter of the first executive director of the United Negro College Fund and her grandfather served for 30 years as president of Livingstone College, Salisbury, N.C. She received her law degree from Northwestern University in 1973 and served as a civil-rights lawyer in Washington, D.C., for 10 years. She has published widely in both legal journals and in anthologies of black women writers.