DON’T LET IT GET YOU DOWN
Essays on Race, Gender, and the Body
By Savala Nolan
In “The Art of the Black Essay,” the scholar Cheryl Blanche Butler declared that “the writer does not choose the essayistic form, the essay unfolds out of her.” The essays in Savala Nolan’s first collection, “Don’t Let It Get You Down,” unfold out of her complex relationship with being a big-bodied, mixed-race Black woman.
Nolan is a law professor at Berkeley who clerked in the Obama administration’s office of White House counsel; but these 12 essays are concerned less with her legal career than with her origin story and personal development, born as she was “in between” racial categories and their corresponding expectations. “I’m a mixed Black woman and what folks have sometimes called ‘a whole lot of yellow wasted,’” Nolan writes, “meaning I have light (yellow) skin ‘wasted’ by Black features.” Her father is not just Black and Mexican; he is also poor, “so poor we went to the bathroom in buckets under a ceiling hole repaired with tarp.” He was raised 20 miles from the Mexican border in California, and spent 20 years of his adolescence and early adulthood in and out of prison, condemned to stay poor. On the white, maternal side of her family, Nolan is a “Daughter of the American Revolution,” with a graduate education just like her mom has and trust-fund friends. Because of these mixed-status origins, the forces of social class hang over the entirety of this standout collection.
Nolan is writing into a long tradition, and its contemporary renaissance. From Du Bois’s “The Souls of Black Folk” to slave narratives, the Black essay is rich with stories of otherness and duality. Writers like Clint Smith, Emily Bernard, Nishta J. Mehra, Ta-Nehisi Coates, Claudia Rankine, Mychal Denzel Smith and Robert Jones Jr. (among many others) bring the modern essay form to bear as much on how the experiences of Blackness differ as they do on how they cohere. This embrace of the heterogeneity of Black womanhood is part of this book’s charm.
Another part is the author’s voice — vulnerable, but rarely veering into self-indulgence. Nolan is so hard on herself that at times one wishes she’d indulge herself more, with some grace, some forgiveness, perhaps a little humor. In “On Dating White Guys While Me,” she explores her naked desire for white male attention, a dynamic more commonly admitted by Black gay writers than by straight Black women. “I’d long sensed that the most succinct, irrefutable way to move up in the world was to be loved by a prototypical white man,” she writes of her relationship with an ex. “I.e., someone at the top.” It is a brutal, beautifully rendered narrative of the perceived “cultural magic in their approval”; Nolan’s holy grail, her passport to belonging. It is a gothic desire, to be objectified so totally that all of your Blackness and bigness disappears. But Nolan’s writing, her stark honesty, conveys how entirely rational this is, as a response to the ways racism, colorism and the patriarchy apportion power to women based on their attractiveness to white men.
That white patriarchal gaze echoes across the collection, with sometimes devastating consequences. In “White Doll,” Nolan recounts the end of her pregnancy and birth of her daughter, Gemma, when her prenatal pain, irregular heartbeat and vomiting went unheeded by her white doctors, despite several trips to the E.R. “We know Black women are more likely to die in childbirth regardless of socioeconomic status,” she writes. “I want credit for surviving a racialized pregnancy.”
“Don’t Let It Get You Down” dances in the spaces between binaries of Black womanhood. When Nolan met her future husband, a white, working-class high school dropout, she realized her earlier mistake in seeking white partners to improve her station in life: “I’d always wanted to be the empress; I was becoming more interested in the gladiator.” From her mother, “thin and frail, like a glass of skim milk,” she’s inherited white diet culture (“I grew up with my WASPy family, with ceaseless diet-and-binge cycles and forced trampoline jumping before dinner”); but from her father she’s inherited a body resistant to such punitive pressure to conform to white beauty standards. Taken together, these essays give the sense that Nolan has not yet solved herself for herself. But they also show how the pieces of our lives do not have to fit neatly in a frame in order to make a portrait worthy of attention.
July 12, 2021 at 04:00PM
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/07/12/books/review/savala-nolan-dont-let-it-get-you-down.html
Savala Nolan Takes a Hard Look at the White Gaze and Its Blind Spots - The New York Times
https://news.google.com/search?q=hard&hl=en-US&gl=US&ceid=US:en
Edit: “…the Jews owned the slave ships”
ReplyDeleteI’m getting sick and tired of seeing disparaging articles written about white people…. constantly putting us down and acting like we’ve each done something personal to you.
ReplyDeleteUsually, the people who write these articles are either POC or Jewish. My guess is this one is both! This is the problem with race mixing, these people end up confused, angry, have no real identity to cling to, and want to blame somebody for their misfortune.
They are just as many disadvantage white people as there are POCs. As a matter fact, there’s not a single thing that white people can do in this country/world that POC people can’t! It’s been like that for decades and you refusing to acknowledge or accept it is absurd!
We don’t have affirmative action for white people, that’s only for POC people. I have to get hired on my merit NOT based on what color the other employees are of any new potential employer. I can’t gather collectively, as a group, w/ other whites without being called “white supremacist, Nazi, KKK members or white nationalist”….yet YOU can have your black history month, African-American student union, Mexican Heritage month & groups to join…. you can say “black power, black or brown pride”, and cry about fake voter suppression, etc… but put “white” in front of any of those first few words mentioned like “power” and it’s frowned upon, violence inciting, and even illegal in some countries!
Let’s also mention this slavery thing we keep getting beat over the head with for centuries…EVERY SINGLE RACE of human has Business leave at one time or another. As a matter fact, what Europeans aren’t even the ones who brought you to America…. The ✡️s oh no the slave ships and 75% of people in America who owned slaves were Jewish… but ya’ll never denounce Israelis or Jewish Americans for any atrocities committed against you - just get Whitey! I understand that the ✡️s are the Head of this worldwide, ever-entwining push of anti-white rhetoric… since they own about 90% of all media - news, social, and entertainment, so it’s easy for this information to be suppressed. Betcha never talk about WHO or which white American FREED THE SLAVES… or the fact that your ancestors were damn lucky they were brought to America and not to some other country like the Muslim or Arab countries where they were castrating their slaves, or even worse!
I understand that it’s difficult for you to be mixed race, I really do but I don’t understand or condone this kind of article constantly being written over and over…. It’s very discriminating, biased, and completely incorrect!