Being Color Struck in America
"One of the things that really intrigued me and that I didn't want to sidestep when I wrote this book was my own discomfort with my great-grandmother Emily's color-struck attitudes, sort of liking people better that were light skinned as opposed to darker skinned."

"In going back and doing a lot of the research, I found that field slaves and house slaves were treated differently. Lighter skinned blacks, very often who were the products of the relations between masters and slave women, often had more privileges given to them. There was a distinction in how people were treated and it lasted. It's one of the repercussions, I believe, of slavery that we are still living with in part today."