Morgan Jerkins This Will Be My Undoing Review
This Volition Be My Undoing by Morgan Jerkins (Harper Perennial 2018)
Reviewed by Janyce Wardlaw
Morgan Jerkins has put her crafty finger on everything it is to exist a black woman in her drove of essays, This Will Exist My Undoing: Living at the Intersection of Black, Female, and Feminist in (White) America. Each essay is a raw anecdote revealing to the untrained heart what the world has infused into a blackness girl to make her want to be white, question all she knows to exist true, or doubt her worth. All the hot buttons are pushed for us in these pages, as Jerkins pulls back the drapery on sexuality, men, hair, Black Girl Magic, and much more.
This Volition Be My Undoing is as much a cocky-examination equally it is an indictment of how black women are treated. Equally a 10-year-old, all Jerkins wanted to exist was a white cheerleader, with all the mainstream accoutrement: "bone-direct hair. Thin nose. Saccharine voice. Slender torso." What black girls are shown is that "powerful and pure" are qualities reserved for white girls. Jerkins tells u.s.a. how white people readily conflate blackness girlhood with black womanhood. Black females are so sexualized, that black girls can never be innocent. Pop culture, history, and even families reinforce this stigma.
An essay dedicated to Michelle Obama holds upwardly the former offset lady both as role model and victim. As a freshman inbound Princeton, Jerkins and other blackness female students revered Michelle Obama, who made the Ivy League school almost hallowed basis for black women. Yet neither Princeton nor Harvard Police was suitable armor for what white people would hurl at Michelle Obama. Begetting out her excellence and rising to such a summit was non plenty. Jerkins waxes poetic on what information technology must have been like for Michelle Robinson at Princeton and for Michelle Obama in the White House.
"We do not need to be subjected to the lie that is the American dream. You are the beacon that reminds black women the they tin can be anything they desire to exist in this land."
At many points in the collection, black women assuredly are nodding their heads in tacit understanding while others, white women and white men, are scratching theirs. Like the time she declined an invitation to leap in the swimming pool at a private gathering during a national writing briefing. No large deal? Overthinking? Consider, Jerkins writes, that a black woman is not afforded the regenerative power to overcome misguided decisions – doing drugs at a party, having spontaneous sex, donning a bikini and jumping into a swimming puddle with people you work with. "Simply in my imagination could I practise any of these things and remain unscathed both professionally and personally." Overthinking these situations is the norm for black women who detect themselves in an "overwhelmingly white space."
Some pop culture rhetoric would have us believe black women and girls are rock stars, wielding the power to overcome and achieve greatness without struggle, pain, or obstacles. Jerkins unpacks the Black Daughter Magic phenomenon, giving rise to its vulnerabilities too as its empowering properties. Black women are held up in this sphere as flawless, peerless, indefectible, even otherworldly – as if they could not be existent. And there'southward the rub. Backside these paragons of perfection – the Beyonces, the Simone Biles, the Viola Davises – oftentimes lies great struggle, self-doubt, and debilitating exterior influences. This heralding has become a "safety space" for black women who are marginalized in a white patriarchal society, shouting to the world their accomplishments and their greatness. Jerkins suggests we should recognize the real magic backside Blackness Daughter Magic and encompass those black women who are in disharmonize with themselves physically and psychologically, living with disabilities. The reclamatory motion that is Blackness Girl Magic is indeed for all blackness girls.
This Will Be My Undoing, is at times unflinching. Jerkins lays bare her personal journeying to the blackness woman she has come to be and to the black womanhood she has come to know. She shares the intimate details of moving through white spaces and confronting the covert racism and willful ignorance of "well-pregnant" white people who live by the insulting and hurtful practice of "color blindness" – not recognizing or respecting the culture and homogenizing information technology with their whiteness. White people tell black women to just be human being despite how gild tells them they're not, or as if the two were are mutually exclusive.
In this collection, we run into how blackness is shaped to a great degree by the important people in life – parents, family, and friends. Jerkins fifty-fifty turns the critical eye on herself – wanting to be a white cheerleader, going to Princeton, living with a white person in gentrified Harlem. She harnesses the lessons learned, and creates an empowering narrative that puts readers on notice. – Black women are all up in this space and "you should have known I was coming."
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Source: https://readdrizzle.blog/2021/02/20/review-this-will-be-my-undoing-by-morgan-jerkins/
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