In Real American: a memoir, Julie Lythcott-Haims stirringly evokes her personal battle with the low self-esteem that American racism routinely inflicts on people of color. The only child of an African-American father and a white British mother, she shows indelibly how so-called "micro" aggressions in addition to blunt force insults can puncture a person's inner life with a thousand sharp cuts. REAL AMERICAN expresses also, through Lythcott-Haims’s path to self-acceptance, the healing power of community in overcoming the hurtful isolation of being incessantly considered "the other."

Philly writer Lise Funderburg, one of the definitive voices exploring biraciality in America, will be interviewing Julie to extend this necessary conversation. Lise's first book, a collection of oral histories, Black, White, Other: Biracial Americans Talk about Race and Identity was the first to explore the lives of adult children of black-white unions.