In Sweet Summer, Bebe Moore Campbell tells her own life story. A lot of it is about fitting into the "white" world and finding out who she really is. Bebe and her family members felt that African Americans always felt as if they had to compete with whites, and either be as good or better than them. African Americans thought that speaking proper English and being educated was going to make them seem white. African Americans thought that "good hair" was white people's hair, and they always tried to make their hair look straight, because then they would have "good hair" and look more white. In the book Sweet Summer, the attempt by African Americans to fit into the "white world" is important because people were putting down their own race for being educated or so called "acting white.".
African Americans always felt as if they had to compete with whites, and either had to be as good as them or even better. Not only the parents put these ideas into the children's heads, but also their teachers. Mrs. Clark, Bebe's teacher, was putting many ideas in children's heads. African Americans believed that whites were always trying to compete with them, and also thought they were superior over African Americans. "Even while the remaining whites anxiously sought buyers for their houses, they made no pretense of equality. They assumed that they were our superiors." Mrs. Clark was making it seem like everything African Americans did in life had to be a competition with whites, "We have to be twice as good as white children at everything they attempted in life, that way you got half a chance of making it."p.234. Nana and Bebe's mother believed that to have the same education as a white child was the first step up the rocky road to success. Almost every person in Sweet Summer has had an issue where they felt as if they had to compete with another race, whether African Americans or whites. Nobody should feel that they have to compete with somebody, and try to be something they are not, because then nobody knows who you really are because you are too busy trying to fit up to somebody else's standards instead of being yourself.