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Tag: nonfiction
Carefree Black Girls: A Celebration of Black Women in Popular Culture by Carefree Black Girls Zeba Blay
My rating: 4 of 5 stars
Read more book reviews like this on my blog shelit.com
Carefree Black Girls: A Celebration of Black Women in Popular Culture by Zeba Blay examines how a viral hashtag focused on Black females living their truths forces the author to revisit periods of pop culture history where the notion of being a carefree Black girl actually comes with some hard truths.
Yet the culture that Black women pour talents and their creativity into, the culture that emulates Black women, steals from Black women, needs Black women, is the same culture that belittles Black women, excludes Black women, ignores Black women.
Culture critic Zeba Blay coined the phrase #carefreeblackgirl in 2013 as “a way to carve out a space of celebration and freedom for Black women online.” She studies how the hashtag evolved in the chapter “Free of Cares,” starting with a phrase of the early twentieth century: “I’m free, white, and 21!” This phrase became a Hollywood catchphrase between the 1920s and 1940s with Black journalists at the time criticizing the phrase as perpetuating White supremacy since being White equates freedom, which is the untrue experience to groups who are not considered White. Though the term falls out of vernacular, the author sees the phrase still play out today from Sex and the City to the modern-day Karens quick to call the police on anyone who’s Black. And even the phrase “carefree Black girl” takes a life of its own where it seems to easily be bestowed upon lighter-skinned, thin Black actresses such as Zendaya and Yara Shahidi while Black critics argue Black females will never have the comfort to be carefree in a Eurocentric society. The phrase even derives from fellow Black writer Collier Meyerson’s Tumblr blog called “Carefree White Girls” that featured White female celebrities from Taylor Swift to Zooey Deschanel who epitomize the “deification of white womanhood.”
The first chapter “Bodies” explores how the Black female body is berated constantly from the Middle Passage to the present. Lizzo and her body is the highlight of the chapter, particularly a moment in April 2020 when the pop star was twerking for a charity “dance-a-thon” hosted via social media by Diddy to raise money for people affected by COVID-19. Once Lizzo begins twerking, Diddy tells her to stop because the watchers need family-friendly entertainment, especially on Easter Sunday. Later in the Instagram live special, reality TV star Draya Michele, who’s thinner and lighter-skinned, begins twerking without any protest. Many think it’s fatphobic for Lizzo to be told to not twerk in public. Others berate Lizzo all the time for revealing her body on social media every chance she gets. The author also shows how Lizzo announced she would be participating in a smoothie detox and points out how White female fat-positive bloggers accused Lizzo of being fatphobic.
The conversation on Lizzo turns to the 1990s portrayal of Countess Vaughn on the hit show Moesha about a Black girl growing up in South Los Angeles. Countess played opposite pop star Brandy’s Moesha as best friend Kim Parker. Her weight becomes a constant punchline, many realize after reliving the show twenty years later when its August 2020 debut on Netflix alarms Black Twitter as tweeters share the collective disgust. The author even calls out the desexualization of fat Black women in entertainment. She points to the portrayal of Kelli, played by Natasha Rothwell, on HBO’s Insecure, where explicit sex scenes are a constant but never feature Kelli. The character talks about her sexual romps, but we never see them or meet her lovers. In the recent series finale, Kelli announces she’s having a baby with a character the audience barely knows because her romantic love growth is never shown on screen compared to the other three main female leads.
The author puts a recent moment like Lizzo’s twerking for COVID-19 relief under a microscope and another moment from a generation ago about Kim Parker’s treatment from her so-called friends on her weight. Then there’s self-reflection as the author views how hard it is to accept her own body thanks to the Eurocentric beauty standard where her body, Lizzo’s body, Countess’ body are unacceptable, and the fact that they are living in their body is too much for many people to accept.
In “Strong Black Lead” playing on Netflix’s name for Black programming, the author details her mental health struggles including suicide attempts and suicidal thoughts. (The book comes with a trigger warning in the beginning.) What she was going through materialized in her writings at the time as she pondered how she was really helping readers then with sharing her draining experiences. It makes her think of other Black women in her life who have struggled but are determined to “stay strong.” The strong Black female trope is examined with calling out somewhat beloved characters such as Kerry Washington’s Olivia Pope on the Shonda Rhimes-helmed political TV drama Scandal to Viola Davis’ Aibileen Clark in the film The Help that many view as problematic with the White savior theme.
Overall, the book is like reading viral pop culture tweets coming from Black Twitter and getting the context that you may never think to reference as the reason why you would like such tweets. The content dives deeper with making comparisons between famous Black women living the height of celebrity now to those who lived at the height in yesteryears. The author shows how the battle is the same, rooted in underappreciation for the Black female’s talent whereas a non-Black female’s talent may receive better treatment over her weight, her age, her appearance. It’s amazing to see the author tie in so many current events with past events and pick them apart to study the relevance and the definition of being a carefree Black girl.
Bone Black: Memories of Girlhood by bell hooks
My rating: 5 of 5 stars
Bone Black by bell hooks is a raw narrative of a Black girl navigating a world that seems to not be able to accept who she is.
bell hooks’ girlhood memoir starts in the countryside of Kentucky where the author is given a keepsake from her late grandmother and sensing the talk around why she gets the beaded purse when she wasn’t her grandmother’s favorite, nor her mother’s favorite. The book opens with a foreword emphasizing how the author’s behavior as a Black girl among six daughters and a son in a poor family came off as rebellious as she pushed against the frustration her family felt for not being able to understand her behavior.
She was sent to bed without dinner. She was told to stop crying, to make no sound or she would be whipped more. No one could talk to her and she could talk to no one. She could hear him telling the mama that the girl had too much spirit, that she had to learn to mind, that that spirit had to be broken.
The main theme throughout the memoir is the loneliness she feels within her family. She is considered the bad girl in the house, and that accusation eats away at her though she tries to conceal it through finding her comfort in raising her voice. She asks her family for a Black doll. Instead of happiness that she wants a doll that looks like her, she’s met with aggression; the White dolls are cheaper and easier to find. But somehow she gets her Black doll, Baby. This example shows bell’s young self fighting for what she wants, something that shouldn’t be a hassle, but her family processes her asking for a Black doll as a hassle. And those conflicting perspectives make bell look like the “problem child.”
She wants to express herself—to speak her mind. To them it is just talking back. Each time she opens her mouth she risks punishment. They punish her so often she feels they persecute her.
Backtalk is a cornerstone of one of her books, Talking Back: Thinking Feminist, Thinking Black , that explores the concept as a way to silence people, especially people of color, who have been taught to stay quiet and not talk to others with equal authority. In her memoir, her family targets her for backtalk, but she feels she’s just expressing her thoughts. Because of her tongue, her family brands her in essence an “old soul,” or how she puts it as an “old woman born again in a young girl’s body.” How she speaks seems to scare her family, according to her, to the point she is believed to be a witch. That leads to her being given a book of fairy tales that describe old female characters as cannibalistic and evil. But a book in her hands transports her to another world, a world where she doesn’t have to be with her family. And reading so much inspires her to start writing.
Loneliness brings me to the edge of what I know. My soul is dark like the inner world of the cave—bone black. I have been drowning in that blackness. Like quicksand it sucks me in and keeps me there in the space of all my pain.
The color black is a recurring theme. Not necessarily about race, but more about the darkness she feels as being treated like she’s too different to understand. “Bone black” is a color she learns about in art class. She defines it as “a black carbonaceous substance obtained by calcifying bones in closed vessels.” To burn bones into ash is like disappearing altogether. Her art teacher allows her to paint with all the black she wants. Her mother doesn’t allow her to wear black because it’s a color only for women. bell rebels against this notion, but it becomes a point of contention between her and her mother. While her mother may not think it’s appropriate for a girl to wear black, bell thinks she should be able to express herself the way she wants.
Overall, the memoir, told mostly in third person, observes everyday acts and unpeels the trauma of a Black girl trying to use her voice when it’s restrained by others. The restraint becomes overwhelming, as in she knows her faith in believing her voice could be stomped out, and that conjures feelings of invisibility and unimportance. Instead of her voice being valued, it’s devalued with her family saying she’s too weird, incomprehensible. Though it’s set in the 1950s and 1960s in rural Kentucky, the pain points of being misunderstood, being silenced, being depressed, being poor, being female, being Black resonate beyond its time, unfortunately since these issues remain commonplace for many children in American households. The writing is simple, but every word conveys more meaning than what meets the eye.
In summer 2020, author Kimberly Jones was known for her young adult novel, I’m Not Dying with You Tonight, co-authored with Gilly Segal. At a protest in Atlanta in the aftermath of George Floyd‘s murder, she broke down the racial inequities plaguing Black communities in a six-minute viral video that has now inspired a new book.
How We Can Win: Race, History and Changing the Money Game That’s Rigged, out this week, explores systemic racism and the economic disparities holding back Black Americans. Henry Holt and Co. is the publisher.
In the video that was viewed by millions across social media platforms, a quote about comparing the socioeconomic factors at play with the game of Monopoly resonated with viewers and contributed to the book’s title, she revealed in a CBS Mornings interview with Gayle King, Nate Burleson, and Tony Dokoupil.
So if I played four hundred rounds of Monopoly with you and I had to play and give you every dime that I made, and then for fifty years, every time that I played, if you didn’t like what I did, you got to burn it like they did in Tulsa and like they did in Rosewood, how can you win? How can you win?
Kimberly Jones
Though some viewers stereotyped her as an angry Black woman for how she delivered her speech on camera in 2020, Kimberly called it “righteous anger.”
“I think sometimes in righteous anger you get to express to people your pain, and I think that’s what people saw,” she said on the news show. “Even though they saw an angry woman, they saw a hurt woman, so they felt that and they were like, ‘Omigod, the pain is visible.'”
She also explained that viewers had reached out to her and said her delivery in the video enlivened the argument well enough to the point they forwarded it to their loved ones in hopes they better understand systemic racism.
“There’s no way to nurture empathy in people if they don’t know the full story,” she said. I think one of the greatest mistakes that we have made is we talk a lot about the miseducation of the Black child, but it’s really the miseducation of the American child that has allowed us to live in a way that we don’t have empathy for each other because it’s in that education, it’s in that knowledge that you can empathize.”
Kimberly teamed up with Gilly Segal a second time for the YA novel Why We Fly that came out last October from indie publisher Sourcebooks Fire.
Fashion psychologist Dawnn Karen wants people to feel confident in their clothes.
Her self-help book, Dress Your Best Life: How to Use Fashion Psychology to Take Your Look—and Your Life—to the Next Level published by Hachette Book Group’s Little, Brown Spark imprint, came out the same time the COVID-19 pandemic took hold of society and forced us to stay home. That means we exchanged our business attire for loose-fitting athleisure to feel comfortable in our living space-turned-workspace. But now that many of us are returning to the office amid delta variant fears or expecting to return eventually, her fashion psychology curriculum can be applied to the current era.
Sweatsuit to Pantsuit
During the pandemic, many of us may have been suffering from repetitious wardrobe complex, which is what the author defines as wearing the same clothes—or versions of the same clothes—over and over again. That means our tie-dye sweatsuits and other forms of athleisure that we zhooshed up as much as we could for the Zoom calls have kept us in a loop.
Staying at home subtracted the decision fatigue many of us dealt with when it came to selecting five office-friendly outfits for five workdays. Dawnn Karen tells readers to avoid this fatigue when you’re faced with too many options for what to wear and buy, which in turn makes you feel often overwhelmed and paralyzed in making decisions you later regret. Buyer’s remorse, anyone? To get ready for the physical office, she suggests taking the time to sense any discomfort with an outfit that you probably hadn’t put on since March 2020.
Mood is central to our outfit selection, according to Dawnn Karen’s fashion psychology. Before approaching your closet in the morning or the night before, she advises to practice mood illustration dressing, or meditating briefly by matching your outfit with how you are feeling. Feeling upbeat? Wear that pop of color.
Feeling down? Wear that comfortable skirt. Or take another step to practice mood enhancement dressing, or to choose what you wear to modify your mood for the better. It’s a tactic to wear the most office-appropriate attire that will make you feel the most confident, e.g. the not-so-sky-high heels or the cardigan for the air conditioning, especially if returning to the office after a year and a half and feeling the weight of pressure to return to work.
“When you thoughtfully assess your emotional state and then dress to respect or match it,” she writes. “The goal here is not to transform or challenge yourself with clothes but to embrace, accept, and honor yourself exactly where you are.”
Stressing Over Dressing
For women, fashion situational code switching may have plagued our former workdays, particularly when you had to put on the pantsuit, preferably designer or name brand, to compete in the office when you would rather wear jeans and a nice top. Switching your attire up for the social setting can be stressful and can extend to the hair and makeup routine where you feel you have to wear your hair a certain way or tone down your makeup.
Fashion identification assimilation and fashion incongruence could be two issues reflective of the times. The former is when you use style to fit in with or blend into a cultural or social group, the author writes, when the latter is when your ideal dress and perceived dress are incompatible. You may want to wear the comfortable clothes that you’ve been wearing for months at home, but it might break the workplace dress code. Then you might think those black leggings you wore at home can be mistaken for black slacks in the office, but that is most likely a no-go. More employees are expecting rules on lax office wear post-pandemic, business insiders forecast, while some employees may return to an unchanged model.
A focal accessory can bring comfort, the author describes as an item that holds psychological value and may be worn repeatedly. It can be worn with your work and outside-of-work outfits. She advises to start small such as with a family heirloom necklace pendant, which can bring the warmth of protection in spirit.
Comfortable in Your Skin Again
“In my experience, the best way to get off the retail therapy treadmill and break the cycle of buying, regretting, then buying some more is mindfulness,” Dawnn Karen writes in the chapter she named “The Science Behind Shopping.”
Need new threads? This book can help you figure out your wardrobe upon emerging from our forced stay-at-home lives. More Americans are purging their closets for multiple reasons from expired trends to weight gain, according to the Associated Press, as we slowly return to normal.
Georgia gubernatorial candidate Stacey Abrams rose to prominence in 2018 as the first Black woman selected by a major party to vie for the highest position in her home state. But when she lost, she alleged voter suppression led to an unfair election. She started an organization and wrote a book about the ordeal but also saw another wave of popularity in 2020 for her contribution to the election of the future president.
Stacey is the prime example of a working woman who writes novels on her free time. She moonlights as a romance novelist under the pseudonym Selena Montgomery. As Selena, she has written four novels with HarperCollins Publishers. As Stacey, she has written two nonfiction best-sellers.
In January, Henry Holt and Co. announced Stacey would release a book in June during the height of the presidential election about her work to make voting equal for all Georgians. Our Time Is Now: Power, Purpose, and the Fight for a Fair America is written like the average politico book discussing her upbringing but adds her journey in creating Fair Fight, an organization dedicated to promoting fair elections in Georgia and across the U.S., encouraging eligible adults to vote, and educating them on their voting rights.
On her media book tour earlier this year, the Yale-trained lawyer and Spelman Woman also motivated Americans to participate in the 2020 Census, which was impacted by the sudden COVID-19 pandemic in March. In her book, she recalls how Republicans such as outgoing President Donald Trump and conservative pundits badmouthed her for not conceding in her 2018 election.
My cardinal sin is that I have refused to concede the outcome of the 2018 gubernatorial contest, and I have made a crusade of calling out and defeating voter suppression. I do so as a private citizen, and this reality greets me every day. As I have traveled the country in the months since the election, I typically begin my speeches the same way. “I am not the governor of Georgia,” I tell the assembled crowds, to boos and hisses of support. Then I declare with equal conviction a truth I hold deep in my heart: “We won.”
Fast forward to November when Democratic President-elect Joe Biden grasped victory, and Stacey along with Atlanta Mayor Keisha Lance Bottoms were being thanked publicly by other Democrats and supporters who credited their campaigning to moving voters to the polls in a traditionally Republican red state in which Biden won the electoral votes. Though she said Trump ridiculed her for not conceding in her election, he has yet to concede in his latest election.
Soon after the election, Stacey notched another book deal. Doubleday and Anchor Books announced her new novel, While Justice Sleeps, a U.S. Supreme Court thriller expected to be on bookshelves by May 25, 2021. Doubleday will manage the first printing of 150,000 copies while the book will be published in hardcover, e-book, and audiobook by Penguin Random House. The paperback version will be published by Anchor in 2022. A romance novelist, Stacey said she’s excited to join the legal thriller genre.
As an avid consumer of legal suspense novels and political thrillers, I am excited to add my voice into the mix. Drawing on my own background as a lawyer and politician, WHILE JUSTICE SLEEPS weaves between the Supreme Court, the White House and international intrigue to see what happens when a lowly law clerk controls the fate of a nation.
As we wait for Stacey’s next book, she spent 2020 becoming an icon in the political world and in the literary world.
When They Call You a Terrorist: A Black Lives Matter Memoir by Patrisse Khan-Cullors
My rating: 5 of 5 stars
When They Call You a Terrorist: A Black Lives Matter Memoir written by Patrisse Khan-Cullors and co-written by asha bandele explores Patrisse’s journey growing up poor in Van Nuys area of Los Angeles and how that led to co-founding the Black Lives Matter movement. I read the book for research on the 1992 LA uprising, which is mentioned once in passing, but the book is very relevant in light of the protests across the U.S. over the death of George Floyd.
The memoir starts with a quote from Assata Shakur and a foreword by Angela Davis, emphasizing the civil rights activism message. Patrisse is raised by a single mother in Van Nuys in an impoverished barrio, a mere mile away from the wealthy neighborhood of Sherman Oaks, now known in the black community as where the fictional Black-ish family lives. She has two brothers and a sister, but she watches her brothers get stopped by the police often as teens, and one of her brothers, who’s later diagnosed with schizophrenia, eventually lives a life in and out of prison. She’s loved by her father but learns he is not her biological father, so she develops a relationship with her biological father, who also is in and out of prison. She describes both those relationships with love to focus on the importance of fathers in a black girl’s life. By the time she’s in her teens, she senses she belongs to the LGBTQ community and makes lifelong friends. She’s on the road to becoming an activist for people like her, but the death of Trayvon Martin in 2012 leads her and fellow activists to form Black Lives Matter to raise their voices for black people killed at the hands of police and racists.
Her story is beautifully written in a poetic prose that remains in present tense throughout, which is rare for a memoir where the past is in past tense. The attention to which details to share is extraordinary as well. She points out the autobiographical details that informed her activist path such as walking down the street as a kid with her mentally ill brother and watching the police frisk him over nothing. It was difficult to put down the book with the flow of the words and the story.
Just Mercy: A Story of Justice and Redemption by Bryan Stevenson
My rating: 5 of 5 stars
In fact, there is a strength, a power even, in understanding brokenness, because embracing our brokenness creates a need and desire for mercy, and perhaps a corresponding need to show mercy. When you experience mercy, you learn things that are hard to learn otherwise. You see things you can’t otherwise see; you hear things you can’t otherwise hear. You begin to recognize the humanity that resides in each of us.
“Just Mercy” is civil rights lawyer Bryan Stevenson’s memoir on his dedication to justice through his legal nonprofit, Equal Justice Initiative or EJI. He writes about the hardship of mostly representing low-income individuals of color in punishment-heavy states who have committed low-level crimes or were wrongly accused of high-level crimes and received death or lifelong imprisonment sentences. He dives into his story but simultaneously focuses on the stories of his clients that reflect the way a legal system will move forward on injustice because of corruption and the lack of resources.
Bryan is fresh out of Harvard Law School in 1983 when he decides to head to Alabama for an internship. There, he eventually meets Walter McMillian, who is sitting on death row for a murder of a young white female clerk. He swears he did not commit the murder and even has countless people to support his alibi. Bryan works feverishly to expose the mistakes that led to Walter’s arrest and imprisonment, and while doing this, his popularity among others suffering a similar fate as Walter is building. He establishes his nonprofit and hires more lawyers and legal staff to help him in numerous cases. Throughout the book, he tells the stories of the people behind bars he helps in several states, but Walter’s story is the one that resonates the entire time.
The book is packed with easily digestible information with weaving in true-life stories that almost seem unbelievable by the way the people had been thrown in prison and even given harsh sentences over crimes they had committed as a juvenile or had not committed at all. The EJI is against the death penalty because many of its clients had been wrongfully imprisoned or had severe mental illness issues that contributed to their crimes. It believes in the notion that many others in the same predicament have yet to see justice. The topic is controversial, but Bryan justifies his point with integrating the socioeconomic and medical backgrounds of his clients on top of the nation’s history that played a role in the oversized prison community and the state and federal players at work to pack prisons for profit. He also adds the voices of some people he’s met over the years who were connected to victims and how they seldom feel satisfied with the death penalty.
Overall, the book melds autobiography with criminal justice history well and lays out a system where failures have ruined lives.
Barracoon: The Story of the Last “Black Cargo” by Zora Neale Hurston
My rating: 4 of 5 stars
“Barracoon” by Zora Neale Hurston is an interesting nonfiction piece from a voice that’s rare in our literature.
Cudjoe Lewis aka Kazoola at the time was considered the sole survivor of the slave ship Clotilda, which brought 150 people in 1860 from around Benin in Africa after the ban on ships from going to the continent. Because of the secretive act, the slaves worked on the Alabama coastline. Zora Neale Hurston interviewed Cudjoe while a graduate student of anthropology in the late 1920s. She would go to his home and discuss his life, where he vividly recalls his life in Africa.
The book is mostly his folktale-sounding true stories from his native land involving how the king interacted with the people and how his father worked for the king. He talks about how he was brought to the king with the others and corralled onto the ship. He shudders at the horrendous journey to America, a strange place where he said it took him and the others from his homeland awhile to learn how to tend to the land, especially the sugarcane. He’s a slave for five years until the Union soldiers arrive in town and tell him he’s free. He asks where does he go now, and the soldiers don’t know. The community settles in what they call Africatown, modern-day Plateau, Alabama, where most of the descendants are African-born from the Clotilda. Cudjoe talks about the family he started and how they were gone by the time he’s speaking with Zora, even mentioning how one of his sons was shot dead by a police officer and how he had to look at his son’s disfigurement to understand what had happened.
It’s a quick read that made me research more on Cudjoe – there’s not enough of his story there, yet it’s there. It’s an interesting journey from living a regular life in Africa to adjusting to a new life in America he did not ask for or want. He expresses his longing to return home, especially with the family he started in America passing before him. The way he loses his son to a gun is the way many black families still lose their sons. He talks about being criticized by other African Americans because he was African and remembered Africa and preferred his African name, a sentiment still felt for African immigrants in America. The book opens the reader to a part of history from a personal account we rarely hear from, similar to “12 Years A Slave” by Solomon Northrup though that’s a first-person account.