Learning to float

"God help me. I stopped hating white people on purpose about a year ago." With that daring confession, African-American journalist Patricia Raybon begins My First White Friend, a piercing account of how she decided, in midlife, to stop hating white America. In a hypnotic narrative that is part journal, part memoir, part social analysis, Raybon discovers that racial forgiveness is a dangerous choice. But the risk isn't in learning to love white people, it's in learning to love herself. "That is the real matter. And it takes a harsh spotlight." . Raybon turns that spotlight first on her fifties…