Scoping the realities of black women's lives: a team examines the effects of shifting roles to adjust for race and gender.(the writing life)

With this issue, Black Issues Book Review introduces THE WRITING LIFE, a department for authors, editors, writers and others engaged in producing the written word. For this premiere, we asked Charisse Jones, a New York correspondent for USA Today and coauthor of Shifting: The Double Lives of Black Women in America (HarperCollins, September 2003, $25.95, ISBN 0-060-09054-4), to share the experience of preparing her first book, an inventive nonfiction work based on original research conducted with Kumea Shorter-Gooden, Ph.D.

From a literary standpoint, it will be my firstborn. Shifting: The Double Lives of Black Women in America speaks of the masks we black women don, the emotional ripples that we weather trying to survive in the face of relentless racism and sexism. It speaks of how we hurt, but also of how we fight back and lean on family and faith to cope, thrive and soar.

As an African American woman, I understood the concept of shifting implicitly. I had done it my entire life, as when I took care not to use slang when speaking with my white peers or when I debated whether to report the cab driver who brazenly passed me by or to snuff my rage, pushing the slight into the recesses of my mind. All the changing, ignoring, self-affirming and …