Unfollow Me
Essays on Complicity
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4.5 • 2 Ratings
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- $17.99
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- $17.99
Publisher Description
An intimate, impertinent, and incisive collection about race, progress, and hypocrisy from Jill Louise Busby, aka Jillisblack.
Jill Louise Busby spent years in the nonprofit sector specializing in Diversity & Inclusion. She spoke at academic institutions, businesses, and detention centers on the topics of Race, Power, and Privilege and delivered over two-hundred workshops to nonprofit organizations all over the California Bay Area.
In 2016, fed up with what passed as progressive in the Pacific Northwest, Busby uploaded a one-minute video about race, white institutions, and faux liberalism to Instagram. The video received millions of views across social platforms. As her pithy persona Jillisblack became an "it-voice" weighing in on all things race-based, Jill began to notice parallels between her performance of "diversity" in the white corporate world and her performance of "wokeness" for her followers. Both, she realized, were scripted.
Unfollow Me is a memoir-in-essays about these scripts; it's about tokenism, micro-fame, and inhabiting spaces-real and virtual, black and white-where complicity is the price of entry. Busby's social commentary manages to be both wryly funny and achingly open-hearted as she recounts her shape-shifting moves among the subtle hierarchies of progressive communities. Unfollow Me is a sharply personal and self-questioning critique of white fragility (and other words for racism), respectability politics (and other words for shame), and all the places where fear masquerades as progress.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Social media star Busby debuts with a trenchant collection of essays on race, authenticity, and ambition. Her musings come in the wake of having achieved viral fame in 2016 after posting a video calling out white people for their "masking of a desire to maintain their racial status with varying displays of eternal naivete," and the essays that follow offer a "look behind the curtain of identity." "Flowers for the Black Artists" covers Busby's time at a retreat for Black artists funded by "(nice, rich, white) liberals," and "Identity" recounts her feelings working for "the nonprofit machine." Her writing is infused with humor and pathos, as in her description of her grandparents in "A Consequence of Us": "My grandfather is a deep rich brown. He loves Cadillacs and most gender roles. My grandmother is inexplicably pale. She loves indulgence and being sick." One of the most moving moments comes in "A Friend of Men," when Busby recalls a conversation with a stranger on an airplane, in which she contemplates her reliance on her online persona: "Like, the idea of going out into the world as just Jill scares the shit out of me." The result is a stirring take on a young woman's search for identity and the fight for racial equity.
