This Will Be My Undoing

What does it truly mean to live in a body that others have already written into history, often before you can speak for yourself? In This Will Be My Undoing, Morgan Jerkins invites you to journey through her deeply personal and cultural exploration of what it means to be a black woman in America — not simply to exist, but to constantly negotiate between pride, vulnerability, and survival. She poses a piercing question: How can you belong to yourself when every system — cultural, educational, sexual, and political — teaches you to belong to others first?

Jerkins argues that black womanhood is defined by this tension between being hypervisible and invisible. Black women are watched, desired, feared, and yet rarely heard. Drawing from memoir, cultural criticism, and history, she intertwines lived experiences with an unflinching intellectual gaze. Her essential claim is that there is a psychic cost to growing up within a society steeped in misogynoir — the specific intersection of racism and sexism aimed at black women — and yet within that wound lies the power of restoration and creation.

Growing Up Under the White Gaze

Jerkins recounts how, as a young girl in New Jersey, she wanted to be a white cheerleader. This dream was not innocent—it mirrored her absorption of the cultural narrative that beauty, desirability, and femininity were synonymous with whiteness. Her rejection from the squad wasn’t just a personal disappointment; it symbolized the early awareness of racial exclusion. The comment from a friend calling her a “monkey” cemented the realization that she was seen not as human, but as other. Across schools, universities, and professions, she explores the constant labor of black girls trying to earn humanity in spaces structured to deny it.

History, Body, and Inheritance

Throughout the book, Jerkins weaves historical insights into personal revelation. From the myth of the “fast-tailed girl” — a cultural term warning black girls against sexual agency — to the legacy of labels that control women’s dress, speech, and morality, she dissects how black womanhood has been shaped by generational fear. These patterns echo wider cultural scripts like the Jezebel stereotype, in which black women’s bodies are portrayed as inherently sexual, dangerous, or untamed. Her essays show that these inherited expectations create psychic splits: black women must repress desire, police their voices, and perform docility to survive.

Searching for Intellectual and Emotional Freedom

Through attending Princeton and later writing professionally, Jerkins reflects on how intellectual spaces reproduce racial hierarchies. She becomes painfully aware of how “free speech” and reason are often coded as white. Her encounters with professors, peers, and white mentors reveal how enlightenment can coexist with exclusion. Yet she insists that black women have always made knowledge — from the enslaved conjure women to modern writers who translate trauma into wisdom. Her essays on Japan and Harlem contrast how black identity shifts across global contexts: in Japan, she feels liberated from American racial codes but haunted by the memory of violence at home. In Harlem, she learns to reenter communal blackness and discover freedom through belonging.

Narratives of Sex, Love, and the Gaze

No exploration of race and gender can ignore sexuality. Jerkins writes candidly about her first encounters with desire, religious guilt, and body shame. Through heartbreak, porn, and self-pleasure, she interprets intimacy as a site of both oppression and resistance. Sex is not simply physical but historical: “Every part of our body is a sex organ,” she writes, echoing the legacy of slavery’s objectification. Yet her eventual reclamation of her body through therapy, masturbation, and surgery also becomes spiritual—a path to reclaiming womanhood as sacred, not sinful.

Writing as Healing

Through writing, Jerkins transforms trauma into artistry. She learns from Zora Neale Hurston, bell hooks, Audre Lorde, and Michelle Obama that self-expression is not self-indulgence — it is survival. Her prose moves from confession to manifesto, culminating in essays that blend politics with prayer. In Harlem, she tells herself and all black women to breathe, live, and dance with resilience: “When you wake up, you survive.” This existential refrain becomes both a warning and a blessing.

In essence, This Will Be My Undoing contends that healing for black women starts with truth-telling—naming the histories that silenced them. Across essays on race, feminism, faith, and creativity, Jerkins proves that undoing is also becoming. She shows that to dismantle stereotypes, you must tell your story again and again until it becomes your own. Her book reminds every woman that liberation is not a single event but a daily conversation between wounds and wonder.

Jerkins examines the phrase “fast-tailed girl,” a term entrenched in the black Christian community that defines a young woman as too promiscuous or too visible. More than mere slang, it is a moral weapon, used by older generations to regulate black female sexuality. Her mother warns her not to become one, and though intended as protection, the phrase creates confusion and shame, teaching black girls to fear their own bodies.

Policing Desire and Innocence

From childhood, Jerkins learns that white girls could be desirable while black girls were dangerous. At recess, boys slapped the butts of Latina and black girls as proof of attractiveness. For black girls, harassment meant attention; invisibility meant rejection. These contradictions trained young black women to equate pain or humiliation with being desired. The cultural policing of black girls makes their sexuality impossible: they are always “fast” even before they act, never granted innocence.

Generational Fear and Inherited Guilt

The language of “fast-tailed girls” comes from fear passed down through generations. As Jerkins notes, mothers shame daughters to protect them, believing fear acts like a vaccine. But it is poison disguised as safety. Black women internalize double binds: to be desired is to risk danger; to be chaste is to be invisible. This echoes missionary-era teachings that linked morality and whiteness, positioning black female sexuality as a threat.

Global and Historical Contexts

The author connects her experiences to Zadie Smith’s Swing Time, which describes similar sexual games among black British girls. Across continents, dark-skinned women are marked for violation and control. This reminds readers that misogynoir is global: a colonial inheritance that conflates skin color with lustfulness. Jerkins transforms this label into critique, arguing that “fast-tailed” is not innate but socially engineered — a preemptive strike against black women’s autonomy.

(Note: Her analysis echoes sociologist Patricia Hill Collins’s work in Black Feminist Thought, which examines how control images—like the Jezebel or the Mammy—shape power. Jerkins reclaims this revelation on a personal level, proving that naming the stereotype disrupts its control.)

Through heartbreaks, abstinence, and erotic exploration, Jerkins shows that sexuality is not simply physical; it is historical and spiritual. Each sexual choice is shadowed by centuries of racial coding. When she trusts a man named Bradley to love her, she feels guilt for wanting intimacy and pride for withholding it. Their eventual breakup leaves her shattered — proof that black women’s purity and desirability are still political currencies.

The Burden of Respectability

Raised in a devout Christian household, Jerkins sees virginity as salvation and desirability as danger. This tension mirrors what feminist scholars call “the politics of respectability.” Her mother’s warnings against being “fast” combine with biblical teachings that equate holiness with silence. As a result, Jerkins seeks validation through academic success and delayed sexuality, but her fear leaves her disconnected from desire and from herself.

Desire in the Aftermath of Trauma

After emotional rejection, Jerkins uses pornography and masturbation as a way to reclaim power. She dissects her fantasies — whether they depict violent domination or forbidden equality — to understand how pleasure has been racialized. Watching white women humiliated on screen becomes an act of vengeance, not lust. For her, orgasm becomes rebellion and self-discovery, not sin.

Liberation Through Honesty

By confronting shame directly, Jerkins reveals how sexuality can also be healing. Her confession of using vibrators or feeling detached during sexual encounters breaks a generational silence. She becomes part of a lineage of black women writers—from Audre Lorde’s “Uses of the Erotic” to Roxane Gay’s Hunger—who use vulnerability to rewrite female strength. Sex is not a curse but a compass directing her back to herself.

Eventually, Jerkins reframes desire as divine energy. When she writes of learning that her pussy is “better than billions of others,” it is not boasting—it is recovery from self-negation. Her sexual awakening becomes theological, a sacred claim that black women’s bodies are temples of truth rather than tabernacles of shame.

In her essay “Black Girl Magic,” Jerkins explores the duality of celebration and exhaustion in black womanhood. The phrase—widely used to praise black female excellence—holds both empowerment and burden. While it honors resilience, it also hides pain, echoing the “Strong Black Woman” trope that demands superhuman endurance at the expense of vulnerability.

Reclaiming Strength and Humanity

Jerkins’s reflection begins with her stepfather’s dementia, an ordeal that forces her mother and herself into caretaking roles without relief. Therapy was shunned (“Black people don’t do therapy”). The expectation to endure becomes her inheritance. She links this to cultural ideals that see black women as the backbone of their families—able to carry everything and complain about nothing. This strength is misinterpreted as magic rather than humanity.

The Debate Over “Black Girl Magic”

Through a controversy between scholars Linda Chavers and Ashley Ford, Jerkins evaluates whether the phrase uplifts or erases suffering. Chavers interprets it as denial of pain; Ford defends it as reclamation of joy. Jerkins argues that both are right: magic must acknowledge scars as proof of life. Her compassion expands the conversation to include disabled black women, often excluded from the glamorous imagery of strength.

The Body as Sacred and Real

Jerkins’s own “second tongue”—a protruding labium that caused years of pain—becomes metaphor for female endurance. Her choice to undergo labiaplasty disrupts feminist purity narratives that condemn body alteration. She reminds readers that true empowerment is not in enduring pain but in choosing relief. Strength is not the absence of vulnerability; it is the ability to seek healing, whether through prayer, surgery, or rest.

Her conclusion: magic is not mythic invincibility but spiritual resilience that survives realism. To be a “Strong Black Woman” is to be tired and still speak. To be magical is to be human enough to break and rebuild.

In one of her most powerful essays, Jerkins interrogates authorship and representation: who gets to tell the stories of black women? She contrasts Beyoncé’s Lemonade and the French film Girlhood to illuminate how white and nonblack creators still dominate narratives of black female experience.

Seeing vs. Being Seen

Lemonade, Jerkins writes, enveloped her and millions of black women in communal mourning and transformation. It was a visual sermon that refused to center whiteness. Every frame, voice, and ritual reminded black women that their sorrow and beauty need no translation. In contrast, Girlhood by Céline Sciamma claimed universality while erasing race, proving how white directors can appropriate black female imagery yet fail to portray its soul. “She did not observe these girls,” Jerkins says. “She confiscated them.”

Beyond Color-Blind Feminism

Critiquing mainstream feminism, Jerkins argues that white women’s supposed empathy often recenters their own feelings. When Taylor Swift responded defensively to Nicki Minaj’s critique of the music industry, it exposed how white women treat equality as sisterhood without examining racial hierarchy. Solidarity cannot exist without acknowledgment of difference.

The Ethics of Imagination

Jerkins insists that writing about black women demands more than inclusion; it requires interrogation. Nonblack creators must ask whether they write from observation or ownership. She calls for black women to claim the pen for themselves — to author the complexity of their lives without dilution. Her vision: stories where black women are not props or symbols of someone else’s humanity, but full subjects with agency.

“We are not lost in the abyss of uniformity,” she concludes. “Blackness is a kaleidoscope.” Writing becomes survival, a refusal to vanish, and a way to answer the question: who will write us, if not ourselves?

In the culminating essays, Jerkins transforms her pain and confusion into a manifesto of peace. Her “undoing” is not destruction but renewal—the daily act of dismantling inherited shame and discovering spiritual autonomy. This echoes bell hooks’s idea that “love is an action,” not sentiment; survival for black women demands intentional restoration.

Undoing Perfection and Fear

In “A Manifesto on Paranoia and Peace,” Jerkins writes a lyrical guide for self-preservation. She instructs black women to “thank God, the Universe, or the ancestors” each morning. The ritual of waking becomes an act of rebellion against a world that routinely erases them. She reframes paranoia—a response to centuries of violence—not as madness but as wisdom: awareness honed from history.

Learning to Rest and Reclaim

Jerkins urges women to honor their exhaustion. “You are not a mule,” she writes, echoing Zora Neale Hurston. She tells readers not to confuse activism with self-neglect. Rest, silence, and joy are revolutionary practices. She reminds black women that their bodies are sacred landscapes—the start of civilization itself.

Freedom Through Naming and Connection

Undoing also means renaming experiences that were once shameful. Fear, anger, and loudness become forms of truth. By speaking these aloud, by dancing and laughing under moonlight, black women reclaim their existence. Jerkins’s language oscillates between sermon and song, merging spirituality, feminism, and ancestry. For her, survival means believing that life itself is testimony.

Her ultimate insight: peace is not silence—it is the refusal to apologize for being alive. Undoing is the beginning of freedom, and freedom is the moment when a black woman looks in the mirror and finally sees herself whole.