{"id":61328,"date":"2021-08-28T02:34:53","date_gmt":"2021-08-28T02:34:53","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.mixedracestudies.org\/?p=61328"},"modified":"2021-08-28T02:34:54","modified_gmt":"2021-08-28T02:34:54","slug":"dont-let-it-get-you-down-essays-on-race-gender-and-the-body","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/?p=61328","title":{"rendered":"Don’t Let It Get You Down: Essays on Race, Gender, and the Body"},"content":{"rendered":"

Don’t Let It Get You Down: Essays on Race, Gender, and the Body<\/strong><\/em><\/a><\/p>\n

Simon & Schuster<\/a>
\n2021-07-13
\n208 pages
\nHardcover ISBN-13: 9781982137267<\/p>\n

Savala Nolan<\/strong><\/a>, Executive Director
\nThelton E. Henderson Center for Social Justice<\/em>
\nUniversity of California, Berkeley School of Law<\/em><\/p>\n

<\/a><\/p>\n

A powerful and provocative collection of essays that offers poignant reflections on living between society\u2019s most charged, politicized, and intractably polar spaces\u2014between black and white, rich and poor, thin and fat.<\/strong><\/p>\n

Savala Nolan knows what it means to live in the in-between. Descended from a Black and Mexican father and a white mother, Nolan\u2019s mixed-race identity is obvious, for better and worse. At her mother\u2019s encouragement, she began her first diet at the age of three and has been both fat and painfully thin throughout her life. She has experienced both the discomfort of generational poverty and the ease of wealth and privilege.<\/p>\n

It is these liminal spaces\u2014of race, class, and body type\u2014that the essays in Don\u2019t Let It Get You Down<\/em> excavate, presenting a clear and nuanced understanding of our society\u2019s most intractable points of tension. The twelve essays that comprise this collection are rich with unforgettable anecdotes and are as humorous and as full of Nolan\u2019s appetites as they are of anxieties. The result is lyrical and magnetic.<\/p>\n

In \u201cOn Dating White Guys While Me,\u201d Nolan realizes her early romantic pursuits of rich, preppy white guys weren\u2019t about preference, but about self-erasure. In the titular essay \u201cDon\u2019t Let it Get You Down,\u201d we traverse the cyclical richness and sorrow of being Black in America as Black children face police brutality, \u201clarge Black females\u201d encounter unique stigma, and Black men carry the weight of other people\u2019s fear. In \u201cBad Education,\u201d we see how women learn to internalize rage and accept violence in order to participate in our culture. And in \u201cTo Wit and Also\u201d we meet Filliss, Grace, and Peggy, the enslaved women owned by Nolan\u2019s white ancestors, reckoning with the knowledge that America\u2019s original sin lives intimately within our present stories. Over and over again, Nolan reminds us that our true identities are often most authentically lived not in the black and white, but in the grey of the in-between.<\/p>\n

Perfect for fans of Heavy<\/em> by Kiese Laymon and Bad Feminist<\/em> by Roxane Gay, Don\u2019t Let It Get You Down<\/em> delivers an essential perspective on race, class, bodies, and gender in America today.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

A powerful and provocative collection of essays that offers poignant reflections on living between society\u2019s most charged, politicized, and intractably polar spaces\u2014between black and white, rich and poor, thin and fat.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[395,11,459,8,17,23674,20],"tags":[31789,10517],"class_list":["post-61328","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-autobiography","category-books","category-history","category-media-archive","category-monographs","category-social-justice","category-usa","tag-savala-nolan","tag-simon-schuster"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/61328","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=61328"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/61328\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":61330,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/61328\/revisions\/61330"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=61328"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=61328"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=61328"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}