Critical Praise

“Copeland pulls off a neat trick in his first-person narrative, capturing the powerful effect racism has had on his and his family's life with humor, wit, and grace without ever breaking into a diatribe.”

——Boston Globe

“…the reader by turns laughs out loud or struggles along with Copeland. From anecdotes of a nerdy black kid in a racist town, to his grandmother's confusing advice to ‘Act your age, not your color,’ to his mother's struggle to be a proud black woman and simultaneously assimilate, to his own struggle to represent himself as an adult and a public figure, Copeland's memoir is… engaging, and always well-intentioned and genuine.”

——San Francisco Chronicle

“In this funny memoir about racism (it sounds strange, but that's what this is), Copeland's wit is the spoonful of sugar that helps his sad stories go down… it's a forum for his lingering bafflement over the insidious tactics of racism. ‘Can you believe these things happened?’ he seems to ask on every page. We can only laugh at his jokes and wish we could say ‘No.’”

——New York Times

“…with humor and pathos [Copeland] traces a life spent dodging racial epithets from blacks and whites [and] achieving what he sees as the true African American attribute: resilience. A native of the once all-white San Leandro, Calif., he concludes that ‘no one person or group...holds the monopoly on what in this society is the 'true' black experience.’ He has demonstrated as much in this affecting book.”

——People Magazine