[Poll Book Tally] This Will Be My Undiong: Living at the intersection of Black, Female, and Feminist in (White) America by Morgan Jerkins 3 stars

[Karin]

Jerkins is an excellent young writer, but I found the essays mixed and the presentation a bit disjointed. I really can't address her experiences as a black woman, of course, but when Overdrive suggested this book I was drawn to the Feminist part of the title. I was a bit tentative about reading this, since the last book I read by a twenty-something feminist was quite a let down in some key areas.

I found it ironic that Jerkins felt so free of racism when she visited Japan, the country that closed its borders for several hundred years to maintain racial and cultural purity given Japan's long history of extreme racism and the fact that they joined the Axis powers in WW II. In fact, I asked an American missionary who is in an interracial marriage in Japan if his daughters had had challenges, but he said no, that it's become much better than it was when I was growing up. However, I knew a man born and raised in Japan who is half Indian who grew up with intense racism there; he ended up later moving to India as a missionary and learning Hindi--he ended up moving there permanently.

I did feel that some of her observations regarding white feminism didn't match with my personal experience which brought together diverse women to discuss our experiences, and we certainly spent a great deal of time in my women's studies classes over the combination of race/class/religion and other factors that added to the problems many women faced--in fact that was my first introduction into the deeper, more real of the American South's Jim Crow laws for me as a Canadian white woman when we studied about black women musicians--by the time I read Billie Holliday's biography this year I was less shocked, although still outraged.

My introduction to feminism came during a two year stint we had in California when I was a child and I started reading the newspaper which had a lot of coverage of Angela Davis, so I have always associated the women's rights movement with the black rights movement, even though I realized later that for women of colour it was a two fold battle and that it wasn't always entwined. I hadn't realized that it was such a separate battle due to thee photos that used to be in the news. The women I see lacking in the photos I could find are the First Nations, Inuit, Métis, (all fighting oppression as well) et al:



Of course, Angela Davis was an activist with more than one cause, and I can't say that I'm an expert on her life, only that hers is the name that stood out most to me because she was younger and hipper (that was a term back then) than the some of the white feminists I read about.