Jerkins's first book builds a coming-of-age account out of discrete, interlocking essays that move between personal memory and cultural argument. She begins with a childhood wound — failing to make an overwhelmingly white cheerleading squad and being told by another Black girl that "they don't accept monkeys like you" — and uses episodes like it to trace how a Black girl raised in a predominantly white New Jersey community, educated at Princeton, and formed in a Black Christian household learns the price of assimilation. The essays take up Black hair and beauty discipline, dating and the wish to be desired without being fetishized, the policing of "fast-tailed" girls and the double standard around Black women's sexuality, mental-health stigma and therapy, travel while Black in Russia, Rachel Dolezal's racial masquerade, and Beyoncé's Lemonade as a rare mass-cultural image of Black women as whole people. An epistolary essay to Michelle Obama widens the private material into a claim about representation. Throughout, Jerkins insists her story is one voice rather than a universal account, even as the book argues that mainstream feminism's protections have historically been reserved for white women.
Author: Morgan Jerkins · Original publisher: Harper Perennial (New York), 2018
