"White Girl Within [is] an important part of the dialogue on race/gender/identity." - Rachel Dolezal, educator, artist, activist, and author of In Full Color
"This book is wholehearted and brilliant. Gladden embodies the struggle to overcome internalized racism in writings that are both cerebral and visceral at the same time, offering different layers of meaning."- Seattle Book Review 5 star review
"The power of the book is that every reader will take away something different, depending on their social identities and orientation toward issues of racial identity and equity." - Seattle Book Review 5 star review
A thought-provoking account of complex intersectional identity experience...Gladden's evocative prose has a lyrical quality which will easily draw readers into the narrative and carry them through to the final page...Anyone hoping to gain insight into the experiences of a person whose outside doesn't correlate to their inner identification will learn empathy in the author's wise pages. - Publishers Weekly
"White Girl Within will upend any fixed notions you have of social categories and inspire you to accept nothing less than becoming fully yourself, beyond those limiting paradigms." -Terry Wolverton, author, Insurgent Muse: life and art at the Woman's Building
"This book offers new, radical, and mind-changing territory. Be prepared to question anything you've ever taken for granted and then some. Race and gender are all up for grabs... While this book goes where angels fear to tread, it does so with an angel's step... If any book can advance the discourse about transcending boundaries this book can. But more than this, Ronnie Gladden adds love to the mix. I'm so impressed." -Mithu M. Sanyal, Author, Identiti"
An unprecedented and moving first-person narrative about growing up transgracial- both transgender and transracial. With candor and courage, White Girl Within lays bare the struggle and journey of an inner White girl who clamors for self-expression behind a Black male exterior. A must-read for anyone whose identity remains socially unrecognized." -Rebecca Tuvel, Ph.D., Associate Professor of Philosophy, Rhodes College
"I loved how Ronnie Gladden brought the reader into [the] self-reflections...[they] definitely have the experience to share."-Cameron Samuels, Featured on NBC in support of banned books
"White Girl Within's epistolary form requires the reader to encounter Gladden's identities without the self-defining narrative of a typical memoir. As such, the book evades a straightforward explanation of the complexities of Gladden's identification-and perhaps that is the point. The uncertainty we may feel reading it, its lack of ready labels or familiar gender or race concepts, and indeed the lack of a clearly delineated 'self' in the text, shift us away from well-worn paths and into the unmapped territory that is contemporary identity." -Molly Littlewood McKibbin, author Rethinking Rachel Dolezal and Transracial Theory and Shades of Gray: Writing the New American Multiracialism