Real American

Real American is a 2017 memoir by American author and educator Julie Lythcott-Haims. Written as a series of short vignettes and reflections, the memoir explores the perspective on race in America which Lythcott-Haims has accumulated as a mixed-race woman of considerable economic privilege. The daughter of an African-American doctor and a white British academic, Lythcott-Haims was raised in predominantly white neighborhoods and attended overwhelmingly white educational institutions, going on to work at one of them—Stanford—as Dean of Freshmen. Seen as Black by most of the white people she meets, Lythcott-Haims has endured a lifetime of subtle prejudice and microaggression from liberal-minded white peers. Best known for her anti-helicopter-parenting polemic How to Raise an Adult (2015), Lythcott-Haims has earned renewed praise for her “riveting and deeply felt” memoir (Publishers’ Weekly).

Lythcott-Haims was born in 1967. Her African-American father, the descendant of a South Carolina slave and her owner, was a brilliant medic who would rise to the position of Assistant Surgeon General under Jimmy Carter. Nevertheless, in the virtually all-white neighborhood of Palisades, N.Y. where he lived with Lythcott-Haims’ white British mother, he was mistaken by neighbors for the gardener.

There were still parts of the U.S. where her parents’ relationship would have endangered their lives, and Lythcott-Haims felt proud that her mother and father “broke the rules.” Nevertheless, Lythcott-Haims found herself growing up between two cultures, neither of which she felt she belonged to. When she and her mother were out without her father, Lythcott-Haims noticed that people wondered what their relationship was—even with her mother, Lythcott-Haims was never seen as white by white people. Meanwhile, when Lythcott-Haims and her father were together without her mother, they were seen as Black and assumed to be of a much lower class-status than they were in reality. Lythcott-Haims recalls being ashamed of her father as a young girl, ashamed of how he was treated and how he accepted it.



As she began attending school, Lythcott-Haims endured the first of a lifetime’s microaggression. She found that if she showed physical affection to her white neighbors, it wasn’t returned in the same way that white friends’ gestures of affection were. When she told an Indian boy in her class that he and she were “the same color,” he was visibly embarrassed. Lythcott-Haims grew to understand that her mother could not help her negotiate these confusions, or even really understand them. When Lythcott-Haims felt desperate to have straight hair, her mother didn’t know how to achieve it. When Lythcott-Haims pointed to a dark freckle and asked her mom, "Is this what I would look like if I were Black?" her mother replied, “Yes, probably.”

By high school, Lythcott-Haims had begun to accept that others saw her as Black (although one high school friend told her “I don’t see you as Black, I see you as normal.”) Accordingly, she began to see herself as Black, but she had little sense of what that ought to entail. Wanting to attend the school dance, she called the only other black kid in the school, even though they hardly knew one another.

Her parents’ loving support enabled her to flourish, but in later years, Lythcott-Haims would come to feel that they had not enabled her to “own” her Blackness. As an undergraduate at Stanford University, Lythcott-Haims encountered yet more prejudice: “‘Oh you go to Stanford too?’ The sound of her voice is intrigue, wonder, even amazement.”



While working her summer job as a waitress, Lythcott-Haims repeatedly encountered bafflement or disbelief in response to the information that she went to Stanford.

After college, Lythcott-Haims continued to struggle with her identity, even going so far as to be baptized a Mormon at a time when the Church of Latter-day Saints did not allow black men to be full members of the lay priesthood (unlike all-white male members).

After studying law, Lythcott-Haims returned to Stanford as Dean of Freshmen, where she encountered the same prejudices among colleagues as she had among fellow students, no longer explicable by age and inexperience. A videographer for a school promotional film expressed surprise to find Lythcott-Haims so eloquent. At a local school, Lythcott-Haims saw a blackface performance. One of her academic colleagues insisted on touching her hair in a meeting.



Lythcott-Haims’s fight to understand her identity acquires new urgency when she has children with her white Jewish husband. Her son, Sawyer, is seen by most people as Black, and Lythcott-Haims fears for his safety in the face of that perception. Meanwhile, her daughter, Avery, “passes” as white: one friend comments that it’s “great” for Avery. Remembering her own wish that her “parents let me own my Blackness,” Lythcott-Haims struggles to prevent internalized self-hatred and prejudice affecting the way she teaches her children to understand their own racial identities.

Ultimately, Lythcott-Haims reaches a stirring conclusion, as she comes to terms with her identity as a Black woman: "They see me. I'm good enough as is. I don't have to fear I'm not Black enough. I belong."