A trenchant, honest, and unique memoir about body image, fashion, and Blackness.
A Black fashion reporter describes how White supremacy led to her crippling perfectionism and subsequent eating disorder.
Growing up in Connecticut, from a young age, Prescod assumed the role of the “token Black girl” in her mostly White group of friends. Sometimes she was forced to play the role of Scary Spice, the only Black Spice Girl, during pretend play. Other times she discovered her classmates’ racist attitudes on three-way phone calls. Years of being teased about her alleged tendency to act White made her jumpy around her Black peers, eliminating the possibility of a safe haven away from her school friends. Due to this isolation, she “became manipulative, calculating, and mean. I was desperate to gain some modicum of control, and to do that, I constantly doled out criticisms, gossiped, and stirred up petty drama. I developed a haughty affect that I employed for both passing judgment and my own protection.” Her sharpness turned out to be an invaluable weapon not only for hiding her internalized racism from her peers, but also for her professional success in the fashion industry. Eventually, though, her ambition and self-hatred morphed into debilitating depression and an eating disorder. “I was in dogged pursuit of an imagined sense of power,” she writes, “and was very mean in doing so….But I wonder now if I was always meanest to myself.” Prescod left the fashion industry for a job at the TV network BET, a move she now sees as the first step on her long, slow recovery. Throughout the text, the author exhibits an impeccable clarity of thought, drawing thoughtful and original connections between institutionalized racism and her personal experience. Her voice is frank, vulnerable, and witty, and she has a talent for using humor to poke fun at her past self while simultaneously underscoring the depth of the systemic violence she was forced to endure.
A trenchant, honest, and unique memoir about body image, fashion, and Blackness.Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2022
ISBN: 978-1-5420-3516-3
Page Count: 286
Publisher: Little A
Review Posted Online: May 23, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2022
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”
The powerful story of a father’s past and a son’s future.
Atlantic senior writer Coates (The Beautiful Struggle: A Father, Two Sons, and an Unlikely Road to Manhood, 2008) offers this eloquent memoir as a letter to his teenage son, bearing witness to his own experiences and conveying passionate hopes for his son’s life. “I am wounded,” he writes. “I am marked by old codes, which shielded me in one world and then chained me in the next.” Coates grew up in the tough neighborhood of West Baltimore, beaten into obedience by his father. “I was a capable boy, intelligent and well-liked,” he remembers, “but powerfully afraid.” His life changed dramatically at Howard University, where his father taught and from which several siblings graduated. Howard, he writes, “had always been one of the most critical gathering posts for black people.” He calls it The Mecca, and its faculty and his fellow students expanded his horizons, helping him to understand “that the black world was its own thing, more than a photo-negative of the people who believe they are white.” Coates refers repeatedly to whites’ insistence on their exclusive racial identity; he realizes now “that nothing so essentialist as race” divides people, but rather “the actual injury done by people intent on naming us, intent on believing that what they have named matters more than anything we could ever actually do.” After he married, the author’s world widened again in New York, and later in Paris, where he finally felt extricated from white America’s exploitative, consumerist dreams. He came to understand that “race” does not fully explain “the breach between the world and me,” yet race exerts a crucial force, and young blacks like his son are vulnerable and endangered by “majoritarian bandits.” Coates desperately wants his son to be able to live “apart from fear—even apart from me.”
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”Pub Date: July 8, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-8129-9354-7
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Spiegel & Grau
Review Posted Online: May 5, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
A fierce, penetrating, and empowering call for change.
Artist and activist Vaid-Menon demonstrates how the normativity of the gender binary represses creativity and inflicts physical and emotional violence.
The author, whose parents emigrated from India, writes about how enforcement of the gender binary begins before birth and affects people in all stages of life, with people of color being especially vulnerable due to Western conceptions of gender as binary. Gender assignments create a narrative for how a person should behave, what they are allowed to like or wear, and how they express themself. Punishment of nonconformity leads to an inseparable link between gender and shame. Vaid-Menon challenges familiar arguments against gender nonconformity, breaking them down into four categories—dismissal, inconvenience, biology, and the slippery slope (fear of the consequences of acceptance). Headers in bold font create an accessible navigation experience from one analysis to the next. The prose maintains a conversational tone that feels as intimate and vulnerable as talking with a best friend. At the same time, the author's turns of phrase in moments of deep insight ring with precision and poetry. In one reflection, they write, “the most lethal part of the human body is not the fist; it is the eye. What people see and how people see it has everything to do with power.” While this short essay speaks honestly of pain and injustice, it concludes with encouragement and an invitation into a future that celebrates transformation.
A fierce, penetrating, and empowering call for change. (writing prompt) (Nonfiction. 14-adult)Pub Date: June 2, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-593-09465-5
Page Count: 64
Publisher: Penguin Workshop
Review Posted Online: March 14, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2020
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