Valerie Graves on "Pressure Makes Diamonds..."
Back in the mid-nineties, a corporate client paid me what he thought was a compliment: “Come on now, you’re not really black. You’re a big-time ad executive.” Pressure Makes Diamonds is a book’s worth of what that client didn’t
know about me, and what it means to be “really” black in my industry and country. Like many African Americans of the late-twentieth and early- twenty-first centuries, I struggled with well-known societal ills. I was no stranger to the broken home, the
How does an American Look?
EXCERPT FROM AFTERWORD of "Pressure Makes Diamonds: Becoming the Woman I Pretended to Be" (The blurred photo wasn't intentional, but on reflection, it seemed appropriate.) "During the opening ceremonies of every Olympic games, as the athletes march in country by country, I notice the homogeneity of most nations. Blonde Swedes, gangly black Kenyans, short reddish brown Pacific Islanders, and so on. Even without their uniforms, their common gene pool identifies them as countrym
