This Bridge Called My Back: Writings by Radical Women of Color

Section one of This Bridge introduces not only the diversity of upbringings the contributors experienced, but also the ways that outside discrimination makes its way inside of communities of color, where it is perpetuated and internalized. The goal is to be white, but community members would also meet ostracization for being too white. These poems and prose pieces express how the writers “learned to live with these contradictions. This is the root of our radicalism” (4).

Nellie Wong writes about growing up longing to be white in her poem “When I Was Growing Up,” internalizing a distaste for her Chinese heritage while craving all things American, which were also coded as being white. Mary Hope Whitehead Lee’s poem “on not bein” is a testament to her treatment within a mostly Black community, wishing she could be a darker brown instead of being such a light skin color, and yet not being light enough to be white, but rather “bein the next best thing to white” (9).

Cherríe Moraga’s poem “For the Color of My Mother” is about her mother, a Hispanic woman who was silenced by society, and it is written in an abstract