A Credit to Your Race

Fiction. City of Vancouver Legacy Book. Set in Surrey, British Columbia, circa 1960, A CREDIT TO YOUR RACE is a story about innocent love awakening between a fifteen-year-old black porter's son and the white girl next door. The novel is a disturbing and convincing portrayal of how the full weight of racism and bigotry came to bear on a youthful, interracial couple.

A CREDIT TO YOUR RACE was published in 1973 in a press run of only a few hundred copies. We are pleased to be making this lost BC novel available to a new audience of readers as part of the City of Vancouver's Legacy Book Project.

If isolation is a key theme of black BC writing, Green's protagonist Billy Robinson is the most fully-drawn expression.--author and social historian Wayde Compton.

...The story gets its power from Truman Green's simple direct, almost dead-pan delivery of what people said and did, almost as if he were telling you about it at the kitchen table. Billy Robinson's acute awareness of what's wrong, here in the hazy pre-dawn of the Civil Rights movement, is compelling and tangled and credible. We can be sorry for what Billy had to endure, and glad that the Legacy Books Project and Anvil Press have brought back his story.--Geist

...the reader sees through [the protagonist] Billy's eyes what it is like to grow up surrounded by massive misinformation about race and miscegenation. Green adds a uniquely small-town Canadian perspective to the topic of interracial romance. Billy's family are the only visible minorities in town, and multiple characters make observations about the large difference between Canada's cultural, political, and juridical environment and the American racial context they glean from television shows and newspaper headlines.--Canadian Literature