Trespassing: My Sojourn in the Halls of Privilege
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Gwendolyn M. Parker
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Review from Kirkus :
Parker candidly addresses issues of race, gender, and the true meaning of privilege for herself and for society at large. By objective accounts, Parker (These Same Long Bones, 1994) was a success. Educated at the preppie Kent School, followed by college at Radcliffe and law school at New York University, she was employed first by a prestigious New York law firm and later by American Express.

Yet her professional life seemed empty, her goals questionable. The story sounds familiar, but Parker's has unusual elements: She is both female and black, and as she considers her experiences, these two factors clearly form the core of her outlook. In one of the most moving and painful lines of this extraordinary memoir, Parker bluntly assesses her situation at the old-boys' law firm: ``I carried the taint of the field and the bedroom.'' Trespassing grips the reader immediately with an evocative chapter on Parker's upbringing in the thriving middle-class black community of Durham, NC. There Parker took life's lessons from her grandmothers.

One taught her that ``money gives you freedom that not even white people can take away''; the other, that intelligence was a sharp, infinitely useful instrument, good for dealing with whites, who, as she put it, ``never expected colored people to have any brains.'' For the next 25 years, these lessons form Parker's creed. Success, fueled by rage and resentment, comes readily, and it is not until her first ``failure'' that Parker steps back to question herself. While she understands the value of her achievement, rage alone, she recognizes, can't sustain her, and it exacts a deep personal and social price.

Parker's questioning of success motivated solely by racial (or other collective) concerns constitutes Trespassing's most important contribution. (For another take on black women's rage, see Jill Nelson, Straight, No Chaser, p. 1194.) A striking memoir of a gifted black woman's lonely, difficult, and unsatisfying climb to the heights of American power and prestige.

Review from Publisher's Weekly :
Until she was 10 years old, Parker, the daughter of a family of middle-class professionals and successful business people, lived in a segregated community in Durham, N.C., where she had so little knowledge of the "white" world that she imagined the term referred to the light color of her mother's skin. When the family moved to Mount Vernon, N.Y., she was mystified and humiliated by the hostility of teachers and fellow students.

But this bright and self-confident young woman was determined to prove her ability and was admitted to Harvard. She won a place at New York University's law school, where she was a classmate of distinguished law professor Lani Guinier. Parker went on to become the only black woman at a Wall Street law firm, then moved on to American Express, where she rose to the rank of senior executive. In this bittersweet and graceful memoir, she evokes the dignity of her family and the hurts and triumphs of a woman successfully struggling against gender bias and racial discrimination. Leaving her Wall Street career behind, Parker recently published her first novel, These Same Long Bones. -Publishers Weekly