... remarkable ... a thoughtful exploration of what it means to be a first-generation college student, a child of immigrants, and a professor to boot ... explores the tension between immigrants’ culture and the American Dream, especially since, as the essays demonstrate so painfully, the American Dream wasn’t designed with immigrants (or people of color more generally) in mind ... While such moments of analysis can take the reader out of the memoir-like moments of the book — and thus the illusion that we’re simply reading autobiographical stories — Capó Crucet’s analysis is exactly why My Time Among the Whites is vital reading for Trumpian times ... Capó Crucet’s clear-eyed examination of whiteness demonstrates that Trump isn’t what ails us; he’s the symptom, not the disease ... emerges as a salve. It incisively traces the ideologies that led to Trump, such as the American Dream, and indicts our adherence to these ideologies, many of which are deeply internalized.
Crucet’s well-written essays are entertaining and accessible, without letting readers or the author herself off the hook for reflecting on and addressing cultural issues. Strongly recommended for all readers.
Crucet's prose is conversational and largely free of flourish, imagery, or metaphor (with, however, a strong penchant for parentheticals). Her structures are looping and elliptical, seeming to go in different directions, until she pulls them together at the end, when you realize that the sentences don't need symbols, because the whole essay has been symbolic ... If My Time Among the Whites teaches us anything, it may be that the metaphorical experience of being first-generation American Latinx is inseparable from any supposedly non-symbolic "real" thing. Crucet's section and essay titles are just as evocative and metaphorical as her book titles ... In its combination of realism and symbolism, the collection is also suffused with contradiction, in the best sense.
... equal parts funny and devastating ... With tenderness, humor and unflinching candor, Crucet explores a wide spectrum of the first-generation American experience from the unique perspective of a Cuban American born and raised in Miami ... Crucet’s point of view is fearless and funny, and while she doesn’t shy away from calling out inequity, bigotry and dysfunction from all quarters, she also treats the people, places and situations that populate her personal history with gentleness and respect. My Time Among the Whites offers an astute and moving account of the experience of otherness in white America.
... lucid and unfeigned ... Crucet’s essays are hopeful, though grounded in the recognition that the social systems in place will not shift anytime soon. Sympathetic and encouraging, Crucet’s observations and experiences offer a path toward learning how we can become less foreign to each other.
As Jennine Capó Crucet makes clear in her thought-provoking collection of essays, whether you are or are not white isn’t just the point—it’s everything ... [a] timely, vital collection.
... full of exchanges that lay bare the ways power and money and race and class work in America in a way that’s serious but that can also be bitingly funny ...
