This Will Be My Undoing

Morgan Jerkins’ debut essay collection, This Will Be My Undoing, was released on January 30th. I bought it on February 10th, finished it on February 14th, and have been struggling to find the right way to write about it ever since.

My challenge hasn’t simply been that this book details Jerkins’ experience as a black woman in America, whereas I’m a white women in America. After all, in the few months that I’ve been running Read + Roam, I’ve reviewed writing about Koreans in Japan, about South Africans living under apartheid, and about the French in the 1700s. Relatability has never been a condition of coverage on this blog. Instead, my hesitancy stems from Jerkins’ vehement (and justified) opposition to having black peoples’ stories co-opted by white people. For example, of white directors and screenwriters, Jerkins writes:

“I do not want a white artist to have either sympathy or empathy for their characters of color. I do not want a white artist to pity a marginalized character’s fortune, as this too easily facilitates a savior complex. I also do not want a white artist to imagine him or herself in the position of that character, because this puts the white experience at the center of a story, whitewashing it altogether.”

And of feminists coming together across the color divide, she declares:

“We cannot come together if we do not recognize our differences first. These differences are best articulated when women of color occupy the center of the discourse while white women remain silent, actively listen, and do not try to reinforce supremacy by inserting themselves in the middle of the discussion.”

This last sentence has lodged itself in my brain for the past two weeks, making me wonder if writing about This Will Be My Undoing amounts to an assertion of dominance, to some sort of erasure. Is there something inherently racist, I’ve been asking myself, about a white woman deigning to pass judgment on a black woman’s book? Even the arguments I used to justify writing about This Will Be My Undoing – namely, that my post would be more tribute than critique – raised myriad issues, chief among them that Jerkins doesn’t need a tribute from me.

Ultimately, I don’t know the answer, or even what the right thing to do is. But I do believe that criticism doesn’t have to lead to co-optation, and that it’s possible for white people to grapple with, learn from, and talk about black art in a way that neither diminishes that art nor casts the writer as some sort of heroic proponent of it. Here’s hoping, at least.

Jerkins writes movingly about what it feels like to be black when white is the “default,” and details how she spent much of her childhood viewing her whiteness relative to other black girls as a mark of superiority. She talks about how her skin – she describes it as the color of a paper bag – allowed her to “pass” to a degree other black girls couldn’t. Her life growing up was all a matter of relativity – she measured her whiteness relative to her childhood bully, Jamirah, a black girl who made no concessions to conform to white culture, and her blackness relative to the white girls on the cheerleading team she desperately vied for position on.

In Jerkins’ finely observed world, every life experience is informed by her blackness – shopping at a bodega, standing at a subway platform, dating in college, even picking a neighborhood to live in. She writes beautifully about her life in Harlem – her observations about being both black and a gentrifier, her experience of, for the first time in her life, being black in a predominantly black place. As she writes:

“I had always used white behavior as a reference point. I did not know how to live in a black space. I did not know where to start, or who could teach me. I was trying to learn behavior that should have been instinctive, behavior that I had been conditioned to see as outside the norm. Now in Harlem, this behavior was spread across my world like jam on toast. It was forcing me to tear myself apart, a persona that had been forged in my New Jersey upbringing and on trips abroad, and be free. But I pathologized that freedom.”

Throughout This Will Be My Undoing, Jerkins contrasts that own pathologizing behavior against the behavior of white people with respect to others’ blackness. She’s critical of white people who claim not to see color or who are guilty of exoticizing black culture:

“White people think it’s a compliment when they do not “see” you as a black person. 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 that they are ‘unraced.’”

She then cites bell hooks’ writing about how “...ethnicity becomes spice, seasoning that can liven up the dull dish that is mainstream white culture.”

The lesson here is that white people’s privilege allows them to play with black identity – denying it when it suits them, fetishizing it when it’s fun – without consequence. And I certainly learned something here. I think back with regret on a childhood I spent describing a certain shade of crayon as “skin color,” or the time when I perceived my galaxy of multi-racial friends as lending my life a patina of liberal eclecticism. Even recently, I caught myself describing my own heritage as “boring, just European.” I was trying to be self-effacing, but I immediately knew better – I was guilty of framing my own background as neutral or default. I’ve been that woman who offends, even unknowingly. Now, I feel equipped to do and be better.