|
About the Book
A Gentle Reminder to a Generation
TO EVERYONE BORN OF AFRICAN DESCENDANT ON OR BEFORE 1950: In case you don't
know or you don't want to remember, you are officially reminded that YOU
WERE BORN COLORED or YOU WERE BORN A NEGRO or YOU WERE BORN COLORED THEN
BECAME A NEGRO. Don't let anyone tell you any differently.
In Don't Blame Me if I Got the Name Wrong, author Barbara Tone Hilliard-Mims
has gathered a bold and beautiful collection of anecdotes, memories, and
family folklore that speak for a generation. It is about how a twenty-first
century Black Woman remembers some of the fun things and some of the
not-so-fun things that occurred when she was a young Colored girl growing up
in Houston. "Events of the past were not always about the pain or about the
struggles," Hilliard-Mims says. "There were bad times, yet we had good
times, and funny times, too."
Don't Blame Me is "not a book on Colored history, Colored economics, Colored
philosophy, or Colored politics," Hilliard-Mims writes. "But many of our
younger generation speak derogatorily about their Colored ancestors. Their
impressions, their comments, and their rhetoric are often negative,
categorizing people as Uncle Toms or shuffling Step'n'fetchits, dreamers of
unfulfilled dreams." Hilliard-Mims shatters many of these stereotypes, and
shows how folks from her generation often proudly admit they lived their
lives as Negros or Coloreds and cherish that cultural identity.
Hilliard-Mims, who "grew from a Colored child to a Black baby-boomer adult,"
is in a unique position to be able to compare how something as seemingly
simple as a racial name change can have a lasting effect on a people.
Visit Ms. Mims' web page:
Barbara Tone Hilliard Mims' Web Page |
|
