Of all the racist things people do, living out white privilege might be the most insidious. White privilege is not just the assumptions that get white people treated better by employers and loan officers. It’s also the mental architecture that permits white people to avoid thinking of themselves as “white” — even as whiteness is assumed as the norm, and everyone who lacks it as “other.” White privilege is most potent when it goes unconsidered.

It will be nearly impossible to avoid considering white privilege after reading “When I Was White: A Memoir.” Author Sarah Valentine is that rare person who has lived both with white privilege and without it, and her account is moving and analytically rigorous.

Literature has given us light-skinned blacks who “passed” as white, from famed critic Anatole Broyard to figures in the poetry of Pittsburgh-based poet Toi Derricotte. Ms. Valentine’s story is something else again. She was born in 1977, and grew up mostly in the North Hills, one of three children in a tightly knit Catholic family. Her parents were white, and so, therefore, was she — until she learned, at age 27, that her biological father, whom she never knew, was African American.

The revelation didn’t really come all at once. Ms. Valentine’s childhood, a fairly idyllic one of academic and athletic success, was punctuated by jarring moments when she was taken for black. For instance, a school counselor suggested that Ms. Valentine — who thought of herself as “olive-skinned” — look into scholarships benefiting minorities. (Her father told her she didn’t qualify.) She goes on to attend Carnegie Mellon University, but when she’s a graduate student at Princeton University, studying Eastern European literature, her suspicions finally compel her to confront her mother about her paternity.

The story her mother tells — that she was raped by a black man while in college — is not entirely convincing, but Ms. Valentine at last has confirmation that she’s biracial. Her unlikely adult rebirth as black throws her for a loop: Having grown up thinking of blacks as “the other,” her first impulse is to wonder whether her behavior will change to fit her own essentialist — that is, racist — notions of blackness. (Spoiler alert: It doesn’t.) And there’s a poignant irony in the fact that when she “comes out” as black, the only friends she has to celebrate with are white (and their idea of celebrating is a bit cringey).

Sarah Valentine’s story of “family” was upended abruptly. “The birthdays, vacations, holidays, family dinners, summer vacations, basketball practices, games, camps and tournaments — everything we did together now felt like a lie, like the whole time an untruth was hovering around us we’d all agreed to ignore,” she writes.

Coping got no easier. “[A]s I discovered my biracial and black identities, I was like a child learning who she is in the world for the first time but with an adult’s mind-set and expectations,” she writes. “Because I was also waking up to the ways I was complicit in whiteness, and how whitenesss operates as an oppressive identity, I was experiencing intellectual and emotional dissolution.” Required to form one identity at the exact moment she was losing another, she teetered on the verge of a mental breakdown.

“When I Was White” is part mystery: Ms. Valentine doubts her mother’s rape story, and the narrative is driven largely by her attempts to learn who her biological father is. We also follow her through her short-lived first marriage, therapy, and early career moves in academia.

But the book is most compelling as an exploration of identity. Early sequences focus on Ms. Valentine’s childhood religious faith, the contours of family life, and teenage friendships — all the things that made her “who she was” before she found out who she was. Her racial attitudes are formed by her friendships, family rituals (including a wrenching teenaged trip to Pittsburgh’s Irish Festival), and racist outbursts from the same mother who drove her to excel.

Post-revelation, Ms. Valentine — while working in an overwhelmingly white academic field — attempts to claim her blackness by exploring natural hairstyles, and eventually by changing her birth surname. The latter move feels crucial: It’s a point where she lays claim to her own identity, and to telling her own story, rather than letting herself be defined by others.

Sarah Valentine, who identifies as biracial, now lives in Carson City, Nev., where she writes full-time. By the end of this memoir, she understands that while learning her father was black has changed her, there is no single, “correct” way to belong to any racial group. And she knows the cost of that insight: the painful reckonings that come with at last being forced to confront our ideas about race, and the racism, unspoken and otherwise, we live with every day.

Bill O’Driscoll is a Pittsburgh-based journalist and arts reporter for 90.5 WESA-FM.

First Published: August 30, 2019, 2:00 p.m.