Though Michelle Miller was an award-winning broadcast journalist for CBS News, few people in her life knew the painful secret she carried: her mother had abandoned her at birth. Los Angeles in 1967 was deeply segregated, and her mother--a Chicana hospital administrator who presented as white, had kept her affair with Michelle's father, Dr. Ross Miller, a married trauma surgeon and Compton's first Black city councilman--hidden, along with the unplanned pregnancy. Raised largely by her father and her paternal grandmother, Michelle had no knowledge of the woman whose genes she shared. Then, fate intervened when Michelle was twenty-two. As her father lay stricken with cancer, he told her, Go and find your mother. Belonging is the chronicle of Michelle's decades-long quest to connect with the woman who gave her life, to confront her past, and ultimately, to find
