A review by jennoel1
This Will Be My Undoing: Living at the Intersection of Black, Female, and Feminist in (White) America by Morgan Jerkins

4.0

“White people think it is a compliment when they do not ‘see’ you as a black person. In their minds, Black people embody the biggest clusterfuck of societal ills: out-of-wedlock pregnancies, single mothers, drug addicts, high school drop-outs. They are robbers, killers, rapists, convicts, degenerates, vegabonds, couch potatoes. Their pants are always sagging, they talk too loudly, they can barely speak English correctly, they dance too sexually. They cannot assimilate to white society, and if they seem perfectly okay with eschewing it, then they are condemned to being black because in a white society, blackness only exists as punishment...In my experience, white people are the only ones who purport to advance equality through the erasure or rejection of marginalized people’s identities, which signals to me that they have fooled themselves into believing they are ‘unraced’. This belief is false, because it is based on the idea that whiteness is the human standard and that furthermore, by virtue of them being white, they are the arbiters of humanity.”

I learned a lot reading this book. I appreciated her honesty and her perspective very much.