Blended

At the core of Blended as a coming-of-age story is Izzy’s growing perception of the wide implications of racism in contemporary America. As Izzy mentions often in the opening pages, she is olive-skinned, neither Black nor white, able to pass as either, seeing her life as a kind of fancy cookie, part chocolate and part vanilla. That relatively harmless sense of her blended racial identity has kept Izzy from acknowledging the hard reality of racism.

That awareness begins with the snarky, insensitive comment she overhears in class from a white kid about the harmlessness of lynching and the subsequent discovery of the noose in her friend’s gym locker. Because Izzy has been raised to carefully balance her white and Black identities, the reality of such ugly racism is new to her. She feels suddenly vulnerable, embarrassed to be white, wanting to be Black. She is torn between which race she is even as she comes to understand that her Black identity subjects her to menacing perceptions and threats of white America. Her father stresses that Black people are constantly being evaluated by white people. In the class discussion, Izzy’s teacher points out that the history of racism in America is hardly a finished