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DON'T LET IT GET YOU DOWN by Savala Nolan

DON'T LET IT GET YOU DOWN

Essays on Race, Gender, and the Body

by Savala Nolan

Pub Date: July 13th, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-982137-26-7
Publisher: Simon & Schuster

A lawyer, writer, and social justice advocate examines the intersection of race, class, gender, and body issues.

In a collection of 12 essays, Nolan processes personal dislocation as a plus-size “in-between,” a “mixed black woman” and Daughter of the American Revolution who grew up surrounded by—but not born into—privilege. Her opening essay, “On Dating White Guys While Me,” which muses on her “body-bigness” especially in regard to White men, establishes the deeply corporeal nature of the author’s intersectional musings. She speaks especially of her “bear paw” feet, which marked her “otherness” from the White elites with whom she lived, studied, worked, and, in too many cases, fell into ambiguous, unreciprocated love. In “The Body Endures,” the author remembers how, as a youth, she tried unsuccessfully to achieve White standards of beauty, thinness, and desirability as portrayed by the young Britney Spears. As she meditates on how the “Mammy” stereotype has haunted her concept of body image throughout her life, Nolan reflects on the many facets of her complex personhood. In “White Doll,” the author discusses how her White mother “sought ways for me to socialize with black adults.” Yet she only succeeded in making a daughter already too aware of her difference from other Blacks feel even “more white.” By contrast, Nolan's Black and Mexican father, who praised his daughter for enduring the pain of hair-braiding, made her feel comfortable in a body that later become a racialized medical “spectacle” when she became a parent. White doctors dismissed the pains—later diagnosed as acute pancreatitis – that threatened both her pregnancy and her life. This fierce and intelligent book is important not just for how it celebrates hard-won pride in one’s identity, but also for how Nolan articulates the complicated—and too often overlooked—nature of personal and cultural in-betweenness.

An eloquently provocative memoir in essays.