More Than I Imagined

An award-winning journalist tells the story of his quest to reconcile with his white mother and the family he’d never met—and how faith brought them all together.
“A compelling and courageous journey that bears witness to the realities of systemic racism, the complexity of identity within that system, and the possibilities of reconciliation.”—Robin DiAngelo, New York Times bestselling author of White Fragility
John Blake grew up in a notorious Black neighborhood in inner-city Baltimore that became the setting for the HBO series The Wire. There he became a self-described “closeted biracial person,” hostile toward white people while hiding the truth of his mother’s race. The son of a Black man and a white woman who met when interracial marriage was still illegal, Blake knew this much about his mother: She vanished from his life not long after his birth, and her family rejected him because of…