You need to sign in or sign up before continuing.

challenging emotional medium-paced
challenging emotional hopeful informative inspiring medium-paced
reflective medium-paced

A phenomenal collection of linked essays about living as a black woman in America. Jerkins’s writing voice is incisive, evocative, and honest – she examines race and gender, exposing how misogyny, racism and exclusionary white feminism intertwine into one insidious entity that harms black women in today’s society every day. Very educational.
challenging dark emotional hopeful informative inspiring reflective slow-paced

This is a really great essay collection. The essays are really personal and vulnerable. I particularly liked "Human, Not Black" and "Who Will Write Us?".

Expand filter menu Content Warnings

Vulnerable-honest-thoughtful-and I really feel like she was born to be a writer. I look forward to seeing more from her, especially as she gets older (because omg, it makes me feel old to say, but she is a baby).
matissaflono's profile picture

matissaflono's review

5.0
adventurous informative reflective medium-paced
challenging dark emotional hopeful informative inspiring reflective sad medium-paced

A superb book. I devoured this. Every chapter had insights and stories and observations that I wanted to hear and learn about. Being a white woman, I can only grok her experience so far, but I appreciated all the things we do have in common. Her stories of not quite fitting in in various situations (wanting to join the cheerleading squad, moving neighborhoods, studying in Japan and Russia) really resonated with me. Any story about her family drew me in (especially her stepfather, who sounds like a delightful person I wished we could have learned more about). And of course her musings and critiques and stories of race in this country and others moved me deeply. A definite recommend.

this book is quite intense , as is the intersection of black, female, and feminist in white america. there are a lot of body image, behavior. want to be white like. im not sure how to write about my thoughts but that it is a constant struggle. everywhere there is a way of existing. for example when she moved into Harlem, she did not know how to be black in harlem. she knew how to be black in her own neighborhoods but not harlem, at least in the beginning and as she had admitted. wny is it that society makes it hard to join
her love life and struggle with how she can be like so she can be loved the way she wanted. i praise her holding onto her belief that this person is not it. that she will not give herself to just a person when she doesnt feel comfortable doing so. i think this is especially powerful when she voiced her doubts in herself, her body, her demeanor, her posture, her voice, her hair, her way of explaining herself. I also find it amazing that she had studied Japanese extensively that she is tested proficient. Her escapism to Japan is also another catching arc to me. I think i find comfort in anime as well. i find escapism in the anime character's ability to do what they want and excel when they tried and hold morals in their decisions >< ahhh
"By providing a vision of black french youth, she is saying they are invisible
Appropriation. They are not worthy to tell their own story and the white benefactor will take their story and tell and not direct resources to the story originator
Non black women should not write about black women
Such as orange is the new black. No one in the writers room is a black women. They are all white despite wanting to bring change to the racism in the prison system
Why do you call yourself black and not just human. The disgusting question that says they are approving of your assimilated whiteness.
Huge oak trees in lemonade symboliZing slavery and generational trauma but also healing and regeneration.

Letter to michelle - someone so perfect so pristine. Someone that is a role model for black women "