"Are you really black and Jewish?" a fellow Yalie once asked Rebecca Walker. "How can that be possible?" She didn't answer him, but the question was one she had been asking her whole life: "Am I possible?"

Her mother, writer Alice Walker, and her father, Jewish civil rights lawyer Mel Levanthal, certainly must have thought so when they posed for their wedding portrait in 1967, in defiance of Mississippi's miscegenation laws. Didn't their "shiny, outlaw love," as their daughter calls it, herald the racial harmony we all knew was just around the corner? Wasn't racial animosity, after all, just a giant misunderstanding that could be remedied by the "clean application of Law," as Mel Levanthal believed, or through the "magic ability of words to redefine and create subjectivity," as per Alice Walker?

History, of course, proved such idealism a bit premature. Racial differences, like marriage itself, turned out to be more complicated. With the rise of black nationalism, Mr. Levanthal was recast almost overnight as an interloper by the very people for whose rights he had fought. Ms. Walker left her husband's arms to embrace feminism and eventual Color Purple fame. While Ms. Walker made San Francisco her home, Mr. Levanthal ended up in lily-white Larchmont, N.Y. , married to the nice Jewish girl his parents had preferred all along. These new worlds barely intersected. Except for one small matter: a "copper-colored" daughter.

"The only problem, of course, is me," Rebecca Walker writes (always in the present tense), describing her parents' union and breakup in Black, White and Jewish . After black and white have retreated to their own comfort zones, "I no longer make sense. I am a remnant, a throwaway, a painful reminder of a happier and more optimistic but ultimately unsustainable time."

That, of course, could be the lament of many a child of divorce–race is only part of the story here. In this lyrical and devastatingly honest memoir, Rebecca Walker bravely shares the details of childhood agonies associated with mixed heritage. There's her Jewish great-grandmother's stony silence; there's her black uncle who described her laugh as "cracker." But how much of Rebecca's personal pain came from being crushed between two (or perhaps three) estranged cultures? How to separate the racial wheat from the general human emotional chaff? How much can be blamed on those other usual suspects: adolescent angst, cultural ennui and that ubiquitous American devil, bad parenting?

Rebecca Levanthal Walker (née Rebecca Grant Levanthal) was in the third grade in Brooklyn when her parents separated. When Alice Walker moved to San Francisco, "where she feels she can write better because she can see the sky," Alice and Mel decided on a joint custody agreement: They shuttled their young daughter back and forth between the East and West coasts every two years.

What were they thinking? "I don't know how they come up with that number, two, as opposed to one, or why they didn't simply put me in junior high here and high school there," Rebecca writes with admirable restraint. "I don't know if staying in one city so that I wouldn't have to spend my life zigzagging the country, so that I could have some semblance of a normal relationship with friends and family members, ever crossed either of my parents' minds."

Trapped in a destructive cycle, needing to re-invent herself every couple of years (and having had little clue as to who she was in the first place), Rebecca found she belonged simultaneously to two worlds and to none. Not surprisingly, some of the adjustments she made took on a racial twist: Denying part of herself each time she shuffled from city to city, from Jewish to black, from status-quo middle class to radical-artist bohe-mian, she trained herself to keep the code, not to say anything too white when she was with friends from the inner city, not to say anything too black when she was at Jewish summer camp.

But mostly Rebecca Walker's story, as she tells it, is about raising herself. Her mother bragged in interviews that she and her daughter were like sisters, but as Rebecca points out, "being my mother's sister doesn't allow me to be her daughter." So while Alice Walker was off on speaking engagements, sometimes for days on end, her "sister" Rebecca was choosing her own high school, taking drugs, having sex and generally fending for herself. When, at 14, Rebecca told her mother she was pregnant, Alice Walker arranged for an abortion. "She doesn't lecture me, she doesn't say, How did this happen, aren't you using birth control, she doesn't say much of any thing, except to call her boyfriend a few hours later and tell him …. I hear her sighing as she speaks, the same sigh I hear when she worries about money, when she's feeling overwhelmed and retreats to her bedroom for hours, sometimes days," Rebecca writes.

When it was Rebecca's father's turn to parent, he didn't do much better. He and stepmother Judy, whom Rebecca guiltily called "Mom," had little or no idea about Rebecca's complicated life. Perhaps afraid of the answers, they didn't ask any questions. "They don't ask if I'm having sex or giving blow jobs or feeling safe," writes Rebecca. When she was in 12th grade, she legally changed her name to Walker, a name that "links me tangibly and forever with blackness." Her father, "oblivious to my reality," suggested her choice had something to do with anti-Semitism.

To judge from Rebecca's account, Alice Walker and Mel Levanthal stumbled into an irony of their own making. They were certain that understanding across racial lines was possible, but as parents they failed to realize that their daughter's unique racial experiences effectively placed her in a "race" to which neither of them belonged.

Rebecca survived. Though she doesn't write much about her present life, we learn in passing that she works as a political activist in the San Francisco Bay area, and that she's gay. She makes it clear that she has found her own way at last. When her female companion, who is black, asks her if she considers black people her people, Rebecca Walker responds with impressive clarity: How can she feel fully identified with any one group of people when she has other people, too, who are not included in that grouping?

Black, White and Jewish should make Rebecca's parents squirm, but it's hardly a Mommy and Daddy Dearest . Mel and Alice are no different from legions of other baby-boomer parents who have mixed a high degree of self-absorption with an even higher degree of creative idealism. Even when parents fall short of their own ideals, they can still manage to pass something of value on to their children. Despite all their parental bumblings, Alice and Mel gave their daughter the tools she needed to work her way out of all this confusion, not the least important of which was love.

Margo Hammond is the books editor of the St. Petersburg Times.

Imagine working on a book about police brutality: The nightsticks rain down faster than you can type.

Outraged by the Amadou Diallo case (hardly ancient history), former Washington Post reporter Jill Nelson set about compiling an anthology bluntly titled Police Brutality . It's being published this month, and already it's badly in need of an update. The acquittal of four members of the New York Police Department's Street Crimes Unit, those who turned Diallo, a man minding his own business, into a shooting target, came too late to meet the book's deadline; so did a whole fresh batch of incidents involving unarmed black men killed or accosted by white police officers. Patrick Dorismond, for one, was still hailing cabs as some of the anthology's essayists were putting the final polish on their pieces.

But no matter. As Katheryn K. Russell, a professor of criminology at the University of Maryland, writes in her essay, "What Did I Do To Be So Black and Blue," police brutality cases all look alike anyway. There are some variations on the dance or "the Roundabout," as Ms. Russell calls it. But, like the cha-cha, once you know the basic step, she says, you can pretty much predict the routine. Here, the key moves as she describes them.

There is an incident of alleged police violence against a person of color.

Expressions of outrage by members of the minority community are followed by calls for calm by the authorities (e.g. mayor, police chief).

The authorities publicly classify the incident as an "aberration" and note that most officers do a good job and that the public should not rush to judgment.

A grand jury declines to issue a criminal indictment. No trial is held, and none of the officers are held accountable.

Ms. Russell's essay (the title is borrowed from Fats Waller's blues classic) comes smack in the middle of Ms. Nelson's anthology, bookended by ruminations from professors, journalists, lawyers, columnists, a former Black Panther activist turned urban planner, a current black activist and a 29-year veteran of the New York Police Department, now retired. Most of the contributors live and work in New York, including New York University's Robin D.G. Kelley and Derrick Bell; Columbia University professor and columnist for The Nation Patricia J. Williams; and Daily News columnist Stanley Crouch. Even Jill Nelson is now a New Yorker, teaching journalism at City College.

The litany of police abuses against black people in Police Brutality makes for numbing reading, and, unfortunately, those who would benefit the most from hearing about those abuses-privileged white people whose experiences with police are mostly positive-are the least likely to read this anthology. Too bad: It could give them a real insight into why so many blacks-even middle-class blacks-are so mistrustful of the police. Even the term "police brutality" will likely strike most whites as too harsh for most of the cases presented here. Whites usually reserve those words for extraordinary acts performed by what they think of as rogue cops. But as this anthology demonstrates, most blacks use the term to cover the whole gamut of negative experiences with police. If you're black, whether it's an everyday event, like being stopped while driving simply because of the color of your skin, or a seminal event, like the beating of Rodney King, it's all part of a pattern that singles you out.

Early on in the anthology there's a depressing chapter of depositions by black after black testifying about the failure of the police to protect them from a mob of rioting whites. It could easily be mistaken for today's news; in fact, the affidavits were taken in 1900.

The most moving stories are more recent. Robin Kelley recounts the time he was running to catch a bus in Long Beach, Calif., when suddenly he was blinded by a light and deafened by the sound of a whirling helicopter above him. He was grabbed by a police officer who beat him to the ground with a nightstick and dumped the contents of his oversize legal briefcase into a pothole of muddy water. When Mr. Kelly asked what he'd done and why he was stopped, the uniformed man replied, "You ran, nigger! Criminals run."

Patricia Williams tells of her friend Deborah, who, while sitting in her car at a gas station in Chicago, watched as two policewomen across the street searched a car and patted down two girls and two boys who appeared to be Latino; one of the officers came over and ordered her to leave. When Deborah refused (a civil rights activist, she considered watching arrests her duty), more police arrived. She was taken from her car, handcuffed, driven to the police station, chained for hours to a bench and charged with, among other things, failing to wear a seat belt.

When police at California's John Wayne Airport identified themselves as "members of the Airport Narcotics Security or something or other" and demanded to see his ticket, Ishmael Reed, a senior lecturer at the University of California at Berkeley, complied, even though he knew he had the right to refuse. He was afraid he would be arrested and the police would plant narcotics in his briefcase so that they could make a charge. Mr. Reed explains: "Many whites believe that blacks are crazy when they accuse the police of planting evidence, yet they're the ones who are crazy, bewitched by the media, which too often serve as a kind of public relations annex for the police, creating and reinforcing the belief that American crime is black or brown, even though over 70 percent of arrests in both cities and rural areas are of whites. In fact, according to recent F.B.I. statistics, it is white adult crime that's on the increase."

Stanley Crouch takes a stab at a solution to the problem of police brutality. He insists that a "strong alliance between the civilians and the police" is the only way to provide real justice to those who live in high-crime neighborhoods. "The antipathy between the community and the police works to the advantage of criminals with and without badges," he writes. Ron Daniels, executive director of the Center for Constitutional Rights, agrees: "Police officers," he writes, "must be educated and trained to see themselves as a vital part of the community, not outsiders under orders to 'occupy' and 'pacify' the community."

Katheryn Russell puts her finger on the reason the problem of police brutality isn't a top attention-getter in this country: It's seen as a "black thing," she argues. Although more whites are arrested than blacks, there is no "white poster child of police brutality," no "white Rodney King." Most likely, she argues, that's not because there are no white victims of police assault, but rather because whites are less likely to think of an assault as a manifestation of brutality. As a result, for both blacks and whites, police brutality is considered a black problem. Even the shooting of the hammer-wielding Gidone Busch by four New York City police officers in August 1999 did not arouse much public outrage nationwide. News reports, after all, cast him as another outsider, centering on his mental illness and his religion, Orthodox Judaism, and not on his "whiteness."

Minorities who complain about police abuse are treated like next-door neighbors who are having a fight, Ms. Russell believes: The rest of us don't want to get involved, and so we tell ourselves that we don't know the facts and that it's none of our business anyway. Ms. Russell argues, "These types of rationales allow us to diminish the collective harm of police brutality."

Meanwhile, as Ms. Williams points out, Dylan Klebold and Eric Harris-"after professing their love for Hitler, declaring their hatred for blacks, Asians and Latinos (on a public Web site no less), downloading instructions for making bombs, accumulating ingredients, assembling them under the protectively indifferent gaze (or perhaps with the assistance) of parents and neighbors, stockpiling guns and ammunition, procuring hand grenades and flak jackets, threatening the lives of classmates, killing 13 and themselves [and] wounding numerous others"-prompt a national conversation about "What went wrong?"

Black males carry the stigma of "suspect," but the police are not the only ones to blame. The brutality in the term "police brutality" begins with a society willing to suspect the members of an entire race, to brand them criminals with a single look. Whereas white males are given the benefit of the doubt-victims, as Patricia Williams puts it, of "innocent profiling."

The difference between reconstructive and cosmetic surgery is as plain as the nose on your face.

Unless, of course, you don't like your nose.

Or your chin. Or your eyes, ears, breasts or penis. Or any other number of body parts you deem undesirable and which make you miserable under your skin. Then the line between the medical necessity of reconstructive procedures (the rebuilding, say, of a soldier's face blown off by war) and the elective quality of cosmetic or "beauty'' surgery (a tummy tuck here, a lip pump there) starts to blur. Both reconstructive and cosmetic procedures, after all, have the same aim: to make someone happy.

Happiness, writes University of Chicago professor Sander L. Gilman in Making the Body Beautiful , is the main goal of plastic surgery, whether it is rebuilding a harelip (a procedure now considered reconstructive but which in the 19th century was labeled as esthetic) or building up (or paring down) that nose on your face. Happiness is, in fact, the only way to measure the success of plastic surgery.

According to E. Bingo Wyer in The Unofficial Guide to Cosmetic Surgery , "In New York City, high-powered baby boomers, including both men and women, represent nearly 70 percent of all cosmetic surgery patients–about 137,000 patients annually." These are not people in pain, at least not physical pain. Most often their surgery is not covered by health insurance. They are not really sick. "Indeed, many of them keep their treatment a secret and thus forfeit all of the sympathy one gains from being ill,'' Mr. Gilman observes. The only way they can determine if their surgery has been a success is if they deem themselves happier than before they went under the knife. "It is the patient, not the physician, who is supposed to judge the success of the procedure,'' Mr. Gilman writes.

But how is that judgment made?

That is the uncomfortable question at the heart of Making the Body Beautiful . Mr. Gilman wades into the murky waters of racial identity, pop culture fantasies and the politics of acculturation. He calls his heavily footnoted study "a cyber-jigsaw puzzle,'' into which he throws a number of interlocking sets of stories. He considers Amy's obsession with her flat nose in Little Women and reports on Barbra Streisand's decision to keep her own "too Jewish'' nose. He describes the man who is transformed into a female breast in Philip Roth's novella The Breast and ponders Mark Rees' transformation, thanks to a bilateral mastectomy, from a masculine-looking woman into a scarred but happier male transsexual. And from this hodgepodge of case studies and cultural references, he comes up with a disturbing answer to the question of how esthetic surgery patients decide on the success or failure of their procedures.

According to Mr. Gilman, the ones who are "happy'' after their operations are those who see themselves as able to "pass'' from the undesirable group to which they belonged before the surgery into the group about which they had been fantasizing.

In other words, the pursuit of happiness through plastic surgery presupposes that there are desirable and undesirable categories. In-groups and out-groups. Hairy, bald. Fat, thin. Large-breasted, small-breasted. Large nose, small nose. Male, female. White, nonwhite. Never mind that our perceptions of these categories are constantly in flux, that even the categories themselves are not fixed. The patient (or more accurately, the client) and the surgeon pretend otherwise.

"Happiness in this instance exists in crossing the boundary separating one category from another,'' Mr. Gilman writes. "It is rooted in the necessary creation of arbitrary demarcations between the perceived reality of the self and the ideal category into which one desires to move.''

Take that nose on your face, for example, and our society's wildly fluctuating views of just how protruding a protuberance it should be. For centuries, people wanted to rid themselves of their too-small noses. With the syphilis epidemic of the 16th century that ravaged people's olfactory organs, a small, flat nose had come to be seen as a sign of immorality. By the end of the 18th century and throughout the 19th, that negative connotation was given a racial twist: Jews' and blacks' small, flat noses were declared signs of their "primitive" natures. The Irish pug nose was also pronounced undesirable. "The Irish nose is the African nose is the Jewish nose,'' Mr. Gilman concludes, underscoring in Gertrude Stein mode the absurdity of such universal racial markings. No matter: They all represented difference and danger.

In response to these racial prejudices, esthetic surgery developed procedures to "correct'' such "ugliness.'' In the 1880's John Orlando Roe, a Rochester, N.Y., surgeon, perfected a procedure that would "cure'' the "pug nose,'' transforming his patients from "Irish'' into "Americans.'' "Whether black, Irish, or Asian, the nose that is too small or too flat has been altered by the esthetic surgeon because of its 'otherness' in relation to Western ideals,'' Mr. Gilman writes. "These ideals are not just concerned with beauty and attractiveness, but with markers of who is and is not acceptably human, who can and cannot be trusted.''

But again–those markers are maddeningly arbitrary. How else to explain that the same groups that are characterized as having small, flat noses are also racially marked as having big schnozzes? And add this irony to the racial confusion: In the house of mirrors that is the world of esthetic surgery, the perfect proboscis now turns out to be the "upturned'' one, the very Irish "pug nose'' that Roe and others sought to correct a century ago. Mr. Gilman quotes a 1989 New York magazine article: "By the mid-60's, an upturned nose had practically become a middle-class status symbol, and hundreds of teenage girls in New York (read: Jewish girls) seemed to be wearing the same design. The bone was narrowed, the tip pinched into a triangle, and there were two distinct bumps above the nostril.'' Jewish girls, convinced their noses are "too Jewish,'' that is too big, want to look like typical American. That is, Irish.

Mr. Gilman's previous books include Jewish Self-Hatred and The Jew's Body , but in this case he's an equal-opportunity debunker. Bravely navigating the ethnic maze with admirable aplomb, he considers nearly every hyphenated group's American dream of "becoming something else." He gets away with such brazenness, and also rescues his dense and rambling prose style, by constantly offering entertaining literary and pop culture references upon which we can all hang our hats.

The novels cited by Mr. Gilman seem to reinforce a pessimistic view of esthetic surgery. "Literature remains surprisingly 'moral' when it sees individuals believing they can cross boundaries from the unerotic to the erotic, from the unhappy to the happy," he reports. From Fay Weldon's The Life and Loves of a She-Devil to Mary Higgins Clark's Let Me Call You Sweetheart , from Carl Hiaasen's Skin Tight to Philip Roth's American Pastoral , the world of esthetic surgery in fiction is a dark dystopia that leads at best to unhappiness, at worst to madness and death.

And yet for the professional descendants of John Orlando Roe, business is booming: In 1996, the total number of all esthetic surgical procedures in the United States exceeded 1.9 million, or about one procedure for every 150 people per year. The fantasy that a nose job or a tummy tuck can change your life is tenacious. The professor isn't opposed to such fantasies. They can (and do) make people happy, he points out. But only for a while. "The symbolic body, our fantasy of fitting into the world, of being unseen, unrecognized, unstereotyped, needs constant reinforcement,'' he warns.

It's as plain as the noses on your face.