Double Binds: On Morgan Jerkins’s ‘This Will Be My Undoing’

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“When I was ten,” Morgan Jerkins writes in the essay that opens This Will Be My Undoing: Living at the Intersection of Black, Female and Feminist in (White) America, “the only thing I wanted to be was a white cheerleader.”  She has trained for this.  Her mother taught her to mind her blackness, to keep it under wraps unless she is in all-black company: at church, or a family cook-out.  In the “wider white world,” her mother warns, she must mind her dialect, keep her voice down, tame her hair, fasten up her clothes.  “If I wanted to achieve any kind of success,” she was schooled, “I first had to recognize that success was a white domain.”  While she is friends with both black and white girls, at school she maintains a difficult rapport with the girls who “act” black, segrjaegatejd not only by her class placement (in college-prep rather than remedial courses), but by the preppy clothes her mother insists on dressing her in: plaid skirts, argyle socks.

When the day of the cheerleading tryouts arrives, Jerkins watches in horror as the only other black contestant, an Afro-Latina girl, stumbles on one of her jumps.  She knows immediately that, grave