First Lines Fridays is a weekly feature for book lovers hosted by Wandering Words. What if instead of judging a book by its cover, its author or its prestige, we judged it by its opening lines?  The rules are as follows:

• Pick a book off your shelf (it could be your current read or on your TBR) and open to the first page
• Copy the first few lines, but don’t give anything else about the book away just yet – you need to hook the reader first
• Finally… reveal the book!

If you’re using Twitter, don’t forget to use #FirstLinesFridays!

Without further ado….

When I was in graduate school at Yale University over twenty years ago, I once asked a friend of mine why everyone always gravitated toward us at student parties. My friend was one of the few black doctoral candidates in the university at the time. Finding ourselves to be the only minority students in a great many of the seminars we attended, we often joked with each other privately about race and identity as a way of blowing off some steam.

And the book reveal is….

Want to support local bookstores? Buy a copy of Not Quite Not White on Bookshop.org!*

*These are not affiliate links and I do not make a commission from any purchase made using these links.