Essays dissect complexities of Blackness

In 12 probing essays, Savala Nolan explores her intersectionality with an unflinching honesty that is both revelatory and unsettling. Nolan, the director of the social justice program at UC Berkeley School of Law, writes in a style that is personal and confessional but informed by an awareness of larger historical narratives rooted in American culture.

In the first essay, “On Dating White Guys While Me,” Nolan recounts her pursuit of not just white men, but the kinds of white men who could share their privilege. She writes, “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 — i.e., someone at the top.”

She reflects upon the value she placed on this aspiration in her younger years, even while acknowledging she did eventually marry a white man, although not one with the kind of privilege she had pursued. Nolan points to our tendency to worship white American and white European culture, whether dating or otherwise.

For example, after spending time in Italy, Nolan falls in love with the culture and language but wonders if she has unconsciously privileged a culture that she admits is more “legible” to her.

Nolan’s essays on gender are critical continuations of conversations most recently shaped by writers such as Brittney Cooper and Roxane Gay. “Dear White Sister” extends Cooper’s essay “WhiteGirl Tears,” and Nolan’s “Bad Education” contains echoes of some of the contradictions touched upon in Gay’s “Bad Feminist.”

In “Bad Education” Nolan struggles with her appreciation, at times, of misogynist pop culture, including a television

Nolan is keenly aware of how her body is read by others, how her mixedcultural heritage — Black, Mexican and white — places her at the nexus of differing cultural narratives.

show that repeatedly depicts violence against women and a rapper whose lyrics she describes as vile.

Nolan is keenly aware of how her body is read by others, how her mixedcultural heritage — Black, Mexican and white — places her at the nexus of differing cultural narratives. Though Nolan does not reject her racial complexities, she describes her delight at finding “home” within her Blackness.

Yet it is that liminal space that allows her to understand how her fatness is intimately inscribed in racial narratives. In the short but powerful essay “Fat in Ways White Girls Don’t Understand” Nolan articulates the history of the mammy myth as inextricable from white American imagination of both Black and white women’s bodies.

At the heart of the book is Nolan’s insistence that she must firmly stand in her truth and not be roped into needlessly debating it. That conviction does not, however, detract from her ability to embrace uncertainty as she seeks to understand herself and the society around her.

Dolen PerkinsValdez’s third novel, “Take My Hand,” will be published by Berkley/Penguin in spring 2022.

Simon and Schuster Savala Nolan is the author of “Don't Let It Get You Down.”