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Assimilation, just on the surface

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In a book world cluttered with memoirs driven more by look-at-me indulgence than a need to say something significant, Jennifer Baszile’s “The Black Girl Next Door” stands out. Baszile is a Yale history professor who grew up black and upper middle class in the South Bay enclave of Palos Verdes; her book tells the story of that life.

Palos Verdes may not be as well known as Beverly Hills or Malibu, but it’s every bit as exclusive -- meaning, every bit as white. In the late 1970s, Baszile’s family was one of the few black families in the neighborhood, a scenario that’s become familiar in American social history.

It’s common to frame this as a positive, equating it with black upward mobility and the triumph of the civil rights movement. But there’s a troubling complement to the picture, rarely told, which Baszile presents in emotional and urgent detail.

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Her mostly losing battle to fit in reminds us that the “only one” syndrome -- being the only black at school and other social settings -- continued long after the days of the movement and in many instances still holds.

Baszile updates the story by examining how isolation and alienation amid success shaped her life; she lays bare the turmoil beneath the stiff-upper-lip endurance that tends to define black narratives about overcoming in white society.

Baszile and her family are not overcoming, they’ve arrived. Theirs is a black story less about resistance than compliance. But it’s a fresh hell: how to comply with a community that won’t have you, ignores you or only accepts you 20% of the time?

“The Black Girl Next Door” isn’t great literature. Baszile’s prose can be clunky and lapse into cliche; sometimes she overworks a metaphor, as when she lingers on the meaning of a black girl like her working at a local Kentucky Fried Chicken.

But her forthrightness and courage in other places more than make up for that. Her poignant struggles with ordinary concerns like friendships and romance make clear that for all the progress made in race relations, there are a lot of gray areas even -- or especially -- at the top of the hill where money is supposed to wipe out racial difference.

It doesn’t. Baszile loves the sunsets and the ocean air of the Pacific, but as she moves up the social scale, the beauty is quickly compromised. Her family wakes up one morning to find a stone cherub on their courtyard fountain marred by blackface; someone scrawls “Go Home Niggers” on the front sidewalk.

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Though a child, Baszile recognizes ominous signs when she sees them. “I could not take my eyes from those words,” she writes. “Sometimes boys whispered the word as I walked by them at school. But I had never experienced hatred in this way: plural, intimate, and anonymous at the same time.”

Her father is furious, but he can do little; he escaped the poverty of rural Louisiana and isn’t going back. This also means not going “back” to the predominantly black and poorer L.A. neighborhoods like South-Central, which is even more forbidding in its own way than Palos Verdes.

That’s the existential and residential crisis of the black upper middle class. Out of the ghetto but still in the hostile territory of whites, it literally has no place to go.

This sense of being trapped is one of many big themes here, but “The Black Girl Next Door” wisely focuses on Baszile. Her racial anguish compounds a typical American teenage angst of not being regarded as pretty and popular in school.

Where most adolescents worry about zits, she worries about her dark skin and kinky hair. Sometimes she’s proud of her distinction; in fifth grade, she announces to her history teacher that she wants to play Harriet Tubman in a school parade of American heroes. (Both the white teacher and her image-conscious mother talk her out of ex-slave Tubman and into portraying the more modern Rosa Parks.)

Another formative moment is more painful. Visiting some white neighbor girls, desperate to be liked, Baszile dons an old-lady costume and affects an exaggerated black drawl, claiming to be the “country grandmother” whom in reality she barely knows.

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The girls are delighted and insist on taking Baszile back to her own house so her family can share in the fun. When she confronts her father, she’s brought face to face with her racial self-ridicule. Her normally outspoken father’s devastated silence amid the laughter confirms her worst thoughts about what she’s done.

Baszile longs for long, flowing hair like her white peers and is excited when she’s old enough to get her hair relaxed -- a euphemism if there ever was one. The process is almost medieval, and as she sits in a salon chair with her scalp on fire, Baszile wonders why nobody told her it would be like this.

As a family, the Basziles live in a tense, integration-induced silence that doesn’t break behind closed doors. The author’s father is a business owner who’s isolated in his success; he never talks about work and doesn’t pal around with Palos Verdes types.

Her mother lives folded evenly into herself, meticulous, pleasant but hard-shelled. She could be a typical Palos Verdes housewife, except her facade covers not boredom but an ancient insecurity about being in a white milieu.

During a visit to her hometown, Detroit, she is more animated than Baszile has ever seen her. But the daughter is appalled: Compared with California, Detroit is a war-torn rubble.

Ultimately, Baszile doesn’t know how to reconcile the past with the present, and nobody gives her instructions. It’s the typical immigrant conundrum, but for black Americans who are not immigrants and whose past and present take place in the same country, it’s a conundrum of quite a different color.

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Kaplan is a contributing editor to The Times’ Opinion pages.

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