RIPE

A young Black woman bares all in this candid collection of personal essays on self-discovery, injustice, and more.

One of the privileges of Whiteness, Kaudo observes, is “emotional range without consequence.” Black women who express their anger can face dire consequences, but the author doesn’t hold back here. She articulates her rage, which is rooted in pain and frustration. She recounts the process of putting that rage in check the way many Black people have learned to do as a matter of self-preservation. She mines her memories, detailing how she’s navigated the “Angry Black Woman” stereotype and the treacherous waters between “invisibility” and “hypervisibility” over a lifetime of being the only Black person (or one of few Black people) in all-White spaces. Ultimately, Kaudo writes, “we are digging to the roots of a silenced history: a womanist and activist culture—a promise to reclaim the dignity of our mothers.” These essays, many of them experimental, explore an eclectic range of topics, including the author’s generation’s anxieties about adulthood, the sanctity of natural hair care, grief, cultural appropriation, and whether God is a Black woman. With unflinching honesty and vulnerability, Kaudo documents her journey to becoming her bolder self, to fight “the active erasure happening to blackness and black people” and the racist double standards and brutality of this nation. The author, a dark-skinned woman, reveals, “I’ve never found myself beautiful…no one’s ever called me beautiful.” Some of the most powerful and breathtaking essays in the collection (“Me, My Fat, and I,” “Thunder Thighs,” “Messy: Brief Notes on Body Positivity,” and “For Your Pleasure”) focus on beauty standards, sex, self-love, and body image issues. Kaudo is a highly self-aware work in progress who doesn’t have all the answers, but she has chosen the most interesting questions to grapple with. The result is a deeply intimate meditation on millennial Black womanhood and a righteous indictment of how this country treats Black girls and women.

Timely, unapologetic, and intense, in all the best ways.