![]() ![]() About what Michelle Obama-who shook America by declaring that the White House she lived in was built by slaves-means to black women and girls. She writes about the respectability politics her mother encouraged as a means of black-girl survival: “Unless I was in a space that was totally black, my dialect had to be modulated, my gesticulations moderated, my voice quieted, my hair tamed, my clothes fastened.” She writes about studying comparative literature at Princeton, traveling to Russia, and living in Harlem. She writes about growing up in a tight-knit Christian community in South Jersey, the bullying she experienced at the hands of her peers, and coming of age. ![]() ![]() Throughout the collection, which ponders these questions, Jerkins’s intellectual interests are expansive and energetic. “I’ve never been asked what I am in my own imagination.” ![]() “What is the black woman, and how do we go about procuring this knowledge about who she is?” writes 25-year-old Morgan Jerkins in her debut essay collection, This Will Be My Undoing (Harper Perennial). This Will Be My Undoing: Living at the Intersection of Black, Female, and Feminist in (White) America, $11 Harper Perennial ![]()
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