Color Blind

Color Blind

A Memoir

By Precious Williams

A memoir of racial identity and fractured family set in 1970s and '80s Britain.

Born in London to a Nigerian princess, Precious Williams saw her life change radically in its first months. Her mother, deciding she couldn't raise a child, placed an ad for foster care in Nursery World. A response soon came from a woman in rural Sussex, and Precious, three months old, was handed off in a basket.

Nan, Precious's new foster mother, was sixty years old and white, and prided herself on being "color blind." But she might also have been shortsighted about the difficulties her black daughter would encounter. At her all-white school, Precious was taunted and ostracized, and Nan struggled to understand her daughter's troubles. Precious's birth mother would visit occasionally, providing glimpses of a different world, but eventually turned critical of a daughter who had become "too white."

Retreating into her imagination, Precious forged her own identity. She emerged from the disillusionment and self-destructiveness of her teen years with a fierce resolve not to let circumstance, class, or color determine her future. Precious Williams tells her extraordinary story in Color Blind, brightly, bravely grappling with issues of identity, motherhood, and race.

Reviews for Color Blind:

“Gorgeously written with a fiercely honest voice, “Color Blind,’’ shows that who we are is shaped by how we are nurtured, even when our histories leave damage that is as much a part of us as our shadows.”—Caroline Leavitt, Boston Globe

Precious Williams’ memoir, Color Blind (Bloomsbury), recounts how this London-born daughter of a Nigerian princess came to be raised by an elderly white woman in an English housing project. Growing up, she struggled with race and class issues, being renamed Anita, and getting raped. “Anita is the elephant in the room,” Williams declares, while “Precious…[is] the writer, the grown woman, the adventurer.”—ELLE Read full column.

“Williams offers an English journalist's wry, charming memoir of being a black Nigerian girl growing up in a 1970s white foster home in a village of West Sussex, England…. Her beautifully wrought memoir reaches back deeply and generously to regain the preciousness she felt lost to her.”—Publishers Weekly

“An affecting memoir about growing up in two worlds, neither quite comfortable with the other… the story moves along toward a satisfying conclusion that speaks to aspiration and desire. Well done.”—Kirkus Reviews

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A Memoir