Eric Walters’ Black and White is a thoughtful book undermined by a serious flaw. The novel is about two middle school suburban kids. Thomas, 13, is in Grade 8. Denyse, 12, is in Grade 7. Thomas is white, Denyse is black. Each is a star player on their respective school’s basketball team, but they don’t know each other. One Friday, however, through a series of funny coincidences, they end up going to the movies together, and affectionate feelings develop.

This is not an against-all-odds type of story. It actually aims to be more sophisticated, as the duo receive an eye-opening education in the confusing grey areas of contemporary race dynamics. Each faces resistance to their budding relationship from their otherwise tolerant, liberal parents. Denyse goes to Thomas’s ski club, where she has to point out to him that she is the only black person on the slopes. In contrast, Thomas attends Denyse’s church, where he is one of only two white faces in the congregation. On the basketball court, Thomas must face down Denyse’s brother’s hard-playing friends, who make inane racial jokes, while Denyse becomes the target of roughing by black girls who call her an “oreo” for dating Thomas.

This would all be equally eye-opening for many young readers if not for a damaging scene late in the book. Thomas’s best friend Steve, who is white, wonders why black people have “such strange names.” Thomas replies that plenty of white people have strange names. As an example, he points to a classmate named Mercedes, jokingly wondering why anyone would name their child after a car. Steve in turn jokes that if her parents had known how fat she was going to get, they would have named her “Mack Truck.” The two boys have a great laugh over this.

Imagine the negative impact on a student reading this book about the need for racial tolerance when they discover that intolerance to body size is apparently acceptable. It’s one brief scene, but disproportionately damaging to the book’s appeal.