This Will Be My Undoing: Living at the Intersection of Black, Female, and Feminist in (White) America

163 Pages·2018·1.84 MB·English

by  Morgan Jerkins

Dedication
For You
Epigraph
I am the first and the last
I am the honored one and the scorned one.
I am the whore and the holy one
I am the wife and the virgin
I am the barren one and many are my daughters. . . .
Daughters of the Dust
Contents
Cover
Title Page
Dedication
Epigraph
1: Monkeys Like You
2: How to Be Docile
3: The Stranger at the Carnival
4: A Hunger for Men’s Eyes
5: A Lotus for Michelle
6: Black Girl Magic
7: Human, Not Black
8: Who Will Write Us?
9: How to Survive: A Manifesto on Paranoia and Peace
10: A Black Girl Like Me
Acknowledgments
Notes
About the Author
Copyright
About the Publisher
1
Monkeys Like You
W
hen I was ten, the only thing I wanted was to be a white cheerleader. Bone-
straight hair. Thin nose. Saccharine voice. Slender body.
When I was ten, I realized that I was black. In some ways, that had nothing to
do with actual cheerleading, but rather with what blackness meant, writ large,
learned from the experience of trying to force myself into this pristine, white,
and coveted space, which spit me out before I could realize how much I had
been abused.
I grew up in Atlantic County, New Jersey, just twenty minutes from Atlantic
City, depending on how fast you drive down the expressway or Black Horse
Pike. There are not many places in Atlantic County you can go where the last
name Jerkins is not known—my uncles Rodney and Freddie have achieved
incredible success in the music industry, producing hits for artists like Jennifer
Lopez and Brandy. Maybe this was why I was generally popular with the black
and Latinx students in my school. Teachers asked if my uncles could pop in to
the class to supplement their math lessons, and aspiring producers wanted to
know how they could get in touch with them. There might have been incidents
when I was called ugly, or rejected by some guy whom I basically didn’t know
but was infatuated with nevertheless, but that was all they were: incidents,
moments. They were not experiences that defined my childhood, or me.
As a kid, I loved TV. I religiously watched shows like Saved by the Bell and
Lizzie McGuire and slept through the weekday nights while The Facts of Life
played in the background. And there she was, always: the cheerleader. She
wasn’t always blonde, but she was always white, skinny, and desirable. She was
equally powerful and pure.
When I was ten, the only thing I wanted to be was a white cheerleader.

Cheerleading tryouts for elementary school were under way, and I knew that
this was my chance. If I made the squad, it would be easier for me to make the
team again and again from middle through high school. All prospective squad
members were mandated to attend nightly sessions in our elementary school’s
cafeteria in order to learn a dance routine, gain tips on how to impress the judges
with our energy and attitude, and practice our jumps. I was one of only four
black girls in a room of about thirty white girls. The others were Tanya, a
second-generation Jamaican-American; Ruby, whose name matched her beauty;
and an Afro-Latina whose name eludes me now. There were no Asians, no
Pacific Islanders, no Native Americans. If you blinked, you might not have
noticed us four black girls there. The cafeteria was large, and the whiteness was
blinding.
Although I could not stir up the strength to lift my pudgy body (with 34C
breasts, to boot) into the air to perfect a pike or tuck, I made up for it with my
enthusiasm. I wasn’t as popular with my black and brown classmates as I was
with the white ones, although I was one of only a few black girls who regularly
mingled with them. To this day, I’m not sure if it was due to circumstance or
colorism, my light skin often associated with whiteness, my identity regularly
mistaken for biracial. Nevertheless, I wanted equal social standing in both
spaces. Just to be in the presence of white girls—mainly those who had been
cheerleaders for years, those whom all the boys, both white and of color, wanted
—I felt privileged. I hoped that if I were adjacent to them, then some of their
desirability could lather me like soapsuds to the skin, polishing me off until I
was just as white as them. I scrutinized how easy it was for them to make their
bodies fly through the air, how graceful their movements were. Every gesture
seemed like a dance. I might have noticed these talents when they sat beside me
in class or brushed past me in the lunchroom line, but these sessions isolated
them so I could study them a little bit more closely. Spatial boundaries did not
apply to their bodies. They could move anywhere they pleased. Their bodies
knew this even if their prepubescent minds didn’t. There was no place that they
could not go without being acknowledged: not the playground, not the
classroom, not the lunchroom, and most certainly not cheerleading practice. I
had only a faint awareness then that being born in white skin, they had been
groomed for this kind of dominance.
Unlike the cheerleaders in sitcoms and cartoons, these white girls weren’t
stuck-up and rude. On the contrary, they were quite helpful, giving me tips on
how to smile when I appeared in front of the judges and how to stretch so that I
could improve my momentum for the jumps. Were they nice to me because of
my uncles, perhaps? Because I was light-skinned? I wasn’t entirely sure. I was
ten; I didn’t know myself. I exhausted so much of my mental energy hoping that
a nonblack girl would swallow me into her identity that I never spent much time
alone with me and only me. Looking back, they seemed to talk to me more than
they did Tanya and Ruby, and both of them were darker than a brown paper bag.
they did Tanya and Ruby, and both of them were darker than a brown paper bag.
But could it have been because I made more of an effort to grovel? All of my
closest friends were older girls of color who weren’t trying out or interested in
cheerleading at all. The more I invested myself into becoming like those white
cheerleaders, the less mental space I devoted to my actual friends. If I could not
be a white girl, then I could mimic one until anyone who saw me would think
that my skin was a costume. I thought myself very ugly. I had ill-fitting glasses,
a large overbite, plaited hair that made me look like a kindergartner, and an adult
woman’s body. I felt caught between two worlds, that of children and that of
grown-up folks. I dreamed that cheerleading would provide a middle ground
where I could be popular, envied by children and adults alike for my youth,
fortitude, and beauty. These white girls were well aware of their beauty and how
much power it yielded. They wore their hair in high ponytails that swung
whenever they moved. They discussed who had the most tubes of lip gloss,
whose butt looked the biggest in Limited Too jeans, who shopped where for
bras. There were of course factions, and enemies swung the word “slut” around
because there was no worse insult to direct towards another girl. Unlike with
white girls, whose repeated mudslinging seemed quite boring and nonchalant,
black girls’ conflicts were more directed and violent. If you were talking behind
someone else’s back, that person confronted you. If that person was bigger or
more popular than you, you either surrendered through crying (i.e., self-
abnegation) or apologizing. But even then, a fight was still a possibility. In our
world, the most immediate solution to silencing someone was through physical
force. Many black girls, including myself, thought of our strength through
physical force as a way of protecting ourselves. White girls weren’t expected to
be strong; they didn’t need to be. They were already supported, cared for, and
coddled enough. Fighting, for them, would have been extravagant—what did
they have to prove?

The night of tryouts arrived. I had been practicing in my room every night; my
mother encouraged me, told me that I “had it in the bag,” that they would be a
fool not to let me in. When she was a child, she didn’t make her cheerleading
squad, but then one girl fell ill and she was accepted into the elite. I felt like I
was a legacy, that I was destined to follow in her footsteps by becoming a
cheerleader and, in the process, I would become beautiful through whiteness. I
don’t know what fueled my mother’s desire to become a cheerleader. I never
asked because I was afraid that in turn she would ask me the same.
Families lined the elementary school hallways with beach chairs, blankets,
and picnic baskets full of food because they knew that tryouts and decisions
and picnic baskets full of food because they knew that tryouts and decisions
would all happen in one night. The judges were the cheerleading coaches, those
who also taught us all the vocabulary, jumps, and dance routines. My mother and
I held hands to pray that God would hold my fear at bay. I knew the dance steps.
I’d practiced them while walking downstairs for breakfast and dinner. I’d
practiced them on the way to the bus stop. My smile was congealed on my face;
I was excited before my moment began. My confidence was so overwhelming,
so filling, that I refused to touch any food or drink before it was my turn.
Every white girl walked out of the cafeteria where the tryouts were held with a
smile on her face. She hugged her mother, high-fived her, or simply walked over
to her spot by some wall in the hallway to relax until the moment of truth. When
my name was called, I walked in with two other white girls and the Afro-Latina.
The judges, all white women, smiled and welcomed us. Their hands gripped
their pens, ink bleeding onto their evaluation sheets. I don’t recall breathing.
Once the music began, I danced our routine almost like I was a programmed
machine. I just went, my body moving and cutting through the air. I made eye
contact to let them know that I was there, and they watched me. When it was
time to judge our jumps, the Afro-Latina was the first to go. We were standing
on opposite sides of the cafeteria, with the white girls couched in between us.
Our order was not intentional, but nevertheless it was significant to me; we stood
as poles for the white girls to remain at the center.
The Afro-Latina faltered on her jumps. She forgot what one of them was and
stood there with a surly look on her face. She jutted her right hip and began to
roll her tongue in her mouth. Oh no, I thought. I knew those gestures well. I’d
seen them in my mother and aunt when they were fed up. She was returning to
being a girl of color. When she forgot her steps, she remembered who she was in
that room full of white women. She was paralyzed.
“Do you want to try again?” one judge asked.
“I don’t know,” she replied. She was not upset. In fact, her expression spoke
of exhaustion. There was nothing left for her to do, so she stood there and we
moved on.
I knew that I had to be better, not only because I wanted to be a cheerleader,
but also to signal to the judges that I wasn’t like her. We might both have had
light brown skin and the same wooly-textured hair, but we were not the same. As
I’d expected, I did my jumps without so much as wobbling when my feet
returned to the ground. I walked out of that cafeteria feeling as airy and euphoric
as the white girls. I couldn’t feel my actual body whatsoever. I imagined, I
almost believed, that my body had no restrictions. I was limitless, white.