Token Black girl A memoir

Former BET style director Prescod lays bare the toxic scaffolding of the fashion and beauty industries in her piercing debut. Growing up in 1990s Westchester, N.Y., in a Black, upper-middle-class family, Prescod was ostracized by her mostly white peers at school, many of whom subjected her to taunts about her hair, skin color, and body. These micro- and macro-aggressions followed her beyond high school, into college at Tufts and the competitive office spaces of fashion magazines, including Teen Vogue, where she was pigeonholed as what one fashion director deemed "a girl with a 'cool downtown urban vibe'." In candid, often devastating scenes, Prescod details how the emotional toll this took on her led to an eating disorder, binge drinking, and directing toward other women the same behavior directed at her, critiquing them for their styles and their weights. By the time she became an editor at Elle.com at age 25, Prescod realized that the racist culture of her youth was codified into media institutions, visible in one manager's refusal to hire models of color, and colleagues' ignorant questions about her hair ("OMG, so cute, but is it going to look like this all the time?"). As she reckons with these small- and large-scale oppressions, Prescod maintains a striking self-awareness and even hope that these problems have solutions. The result is sure to galvanize those who are looking to make change from within fraught spaces. (Oct.)

A Black fashion reporter describes how White supremacy led to her crippling perfectionism and subsequent eating disorder. Growing up in Connecticut, from a young age, Prescod assumed the role of the "token Black girl" in her mostly White group of friends. Sometimes she was forced to play the role of Scary Spice, the only Black Spice Girl, during pretend play. Other times she discovered her classmates' racist attitudes on three-way phone calls. Years of being teased about her alleged tendency to act White made her jumpy around her Black peers, eliminating the possibility of a safe haven away from her school friends. Due to this isolation, she "became manipulative, calculating, and mean. I was desperate to gain some modicum of control, and to do that, I constantly doled out criticisms, gossiped, and stirred up petty drama. I developed a haughty affect that I employed for both passing judgment and my own protection." Her sharpness turned out to be an invaluable weapon not only for hiding her internalized racism from her peers, but also for her professional success in the fashion industry. Eventually, though, her ambition and self-hatred morphed into debilitating depression and an eating disorder. "I was in dogged pursuit of an imagined sense of power," she writes, "and was very mean in doing so….But I wonder now if I was always meanest to myself." Prescod left the fashion industry for a job at the TV network BET, a move she now sees as the first step on her long, slow recovery. Throughout the text, the author exhibits an impeccable clarity of thought, drawing thoughtful and original connections between institutionalized racism and her personal experience. Her voice is frank, vulnerable, and witty, and she has a talent for using humor to poke fun at her past self while simultaneously underscoring the depth of the systemic violence she was forced to endure. A trenchant, honest, and unique memoir about body image, fashion, and Blackness. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.