Award-winning poet to share struggles in a 'white world'

Award-winning poet and author Toi Derricotte will share her experiences as a black woman living in a society where racism and sexism exist at 7:30 p.m. Wednesday night at the Neal-Marshall Black Culture Center Grand Hall. The Office of Vice President of Academic Support and Diversity, the department of English, and the MFA Creative Writing Program are all sponsoring the event, according to a press release.\nThe author will describe her interactions with family, friends and neighbors, and questions what it means to be living in a racially divided world.\nIn her memoir "The Black Notebooks: An Interior Journey," Derricotte writes of challenges of living in a "white world." \n"All my life I have passed invisibly into the white world, and all my life I have felt that sudden and alarming moment of consciousness there, of remembering I am black," she wrote. Derricotte compares her experiences with "touching an electric fence" or being a "deer paralyzed in the headlights of an oncoming car."\nShe began her book 20 years ago as a journal when she lived in New York City in an all-white neighborhood.\n"I wanted to capture the language of self-hate, the pain of re-emerging thought and buried memory and consciousness," she wrote, believing she experienced a type of refusal of self.