Where You Are Is Not Who You Are

""I am a black woman who doesn't play golf, doesn't belong to or go to any club, doesn't like NASCAR, doesn't like country music, and has a Science degree in engineering. I speak differently, very fast, with an accent and a set of vernacular that is New York City, definitely Black tilted. So when someone says I'm going to introduce you to the next CEO of Xerox, and the candidates are lined up against a wall, I would be the first one voted off the island." Where You Are is Not Who You Are is an engaging memoir by Ursula Burns, former Chief Executive Officer of the Xerox Corporation. Her appointment as the first African American woman to head a Fortune 500 company in 2010 drew headlines, which, Ms. Burns insists, missed the real story. "It should have been-How did this happen? How is it possible that the Xerox Corporation produced the first African American woman CEO? Not this spectacular, ridiculous one about, Oh, my god, a black woman making it." How was it possible? Burns writes movingly about her journey from growing up in tenement housing on the Lower East Side of Manhattan to the highest echelon of the corporate world. Her champion was her single Panamanian mother, Racquel Olga Burns, who set no limits on what her children could achieve. A licensed child care provider, Racquel Burns, whose highest annual income was $4,200, managed to send Ursula and her siblings to the local parochial school and to send Ursula on to a Catholic High School where a nun told her she had three choices for her future: a nun, a teacher or a nurse. But Ursula wanted to make money to help her mother. Taking advantage of the opportunities and social programs brought about by the Civil Rights and Women's movements, Ursula was accepted into many colleges, including Yale. Instead she chose to pursue engineering at Brooklyn Poly Tech and then at Columbia graduate school, sponsored by Xerox, where she had been a summer intern. Burns writes about race. Her classmates, and later, her colleagues