Be White With Me

With apologies to the great Tolstoy, all happy Black families are not alike and every unhappy Black family is unhappy in its own way. Meet the Dunlap family: Linnea is the polar star in the firmament. Her father Eddie has early-onset Alzheimer’s and is acting out with a loaded gun. Recently at her workplace, a disturbed criminal shot a cop. Inexplicitly, the shooter asks Linnea to be “white with him.”

Rowena, the mother, dotes on Linnea’s big brother Terry and she is helplessly codependent. Terry arrives home from Guantanamo Bay, Cuba harboring deeply personal secrets. Rowena resolves to cope in this ever-changing world just as Donald Trump emerges on the political scene, while Linnea secretly longs to have Eddie institutionalized, which leaves her grappling with nagging self-recrimination.

As an attorney and daughter of a soon-to-be convicted felon, Linnea fears her life and legal career will never again be the same even as she grapples with complicated matters of the heart involving different men, and both are keepers. Then, one winter night, Eddie vacates the rational world and now Linnea must save him from himself or two unrelated families could be shattered forever.

Be White With Me empathetically spotlights the emotional turmoil set in motion when a by-product of Alzheimer’s is senseless violence. And while the public generally thinks of dementia as tragic memory loss, sometimes that’s the least of the problems.