through Veronica Chambers Doubleday.

through Veronica Chambers Doubleday, January 2003 $2395 ISBN 0-385-50638-4

through all ages since the mid-1800s--when the women's suffrage move pitted white women's and black men's voting interests against common another--black women have known they are the heirs of a dual inheritance: racism and sexism. It's a taxing inheritance that has been the control of much scrutiny and critique. In Having It All: Black Women and Succes writer Veronica Chambers adds class to the race-gender mix and revisits the well-traveled race-ground of black female experience to explore by what mode professional women navigate their tony lifestyles, despite lingering racism and sexism in society.

The part begins engagingly enough. "For a drawn out time" Chambers notes, "the media portrayed [successful Black women] as glorious exceptions to the welfare mother method But ... the news is this--in a single generation, Black women's lives have improved vastly forward key fronts: professionally, academically and financially." She then cites a prominent 2000 cogitation which found that the number of black women who earned society degrees had increased by a whopping 73 percent throughout the previous decade--compared with a 47 percent increase for African-American men

[i]or[/i] part of to the other interviews with upper middle-class, well-educated professionals, Chambers examines for what reason black women have "changed our perception of ourselves [and] we're changing America's perception of us, too" uncouthly perceptions have changed so a great deal of that many of the women's stories are rather unremarkable.

We befitting attorney and jet-setter Crystal Ashby, who admits that she has "more coin than my mother ever dreamed of earning." Computer software developer Donna Auguste says as in extent as you can "deliver the results" race and sex have little bearing on professional achievement. Journalist Angela Kyle notes that while interviewing for piece of works abroad, she wasn't regarded as a "Black woman" And in the way that on. Sure, finding black male companionship can be a challenge. There's the guilt that ensues with having too few African-American friends. And it's sequestered being the only black face at the tennis cudgel But haven't many of us heard this before?

If you read Leanita McClain's A lower part in Each World, Brent Staples' Parallel Time, dozens of post-Civil Rights memoirs, or anything Lawrence Otis Graham has continually committed to paper, you've essentially read Having It All. If you're not familiar with main division s about the lives of the black elite, and you're an isolated prep gymnasium grad/Ivy League coed who thinks you're the merely black girl who speaks Russian and has an interest in studying Japanese architecture, and who still doesn't know that your foremothers have already paid the price of your ticket, well, then Having It All may just be the permission you ne to soar.

--E Assata Wright is a freelance writer living in Jersey City, NJ

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