Everyday Something Has Tried to Kill Me and Has Failed: Notes from Periracial America

These magnetic essays by McLarin (Womanish), a creative writing professor at Emerson College, explore the routine injustices she and other Black women face in America. In “On Being Anti-White, and Other Lies,” McLarin recounts being accused of “anti-whiteness” by family, colleagues, and journalists, writing that while the charges hurt, “if I actually did hate white people, it would not be unreasonable” (the essay opens with an account of the author evacuating her Emerson office after someone calls in a bomb threat against her and a Black woman colleague). McLarin’s discussion of caring for her aging mother in “Weathering” serves as an examination of how “the toxic stew of racism and sexism (misogynoir) in which Black women simmer” takes a toll on their health, as seen in medical research showing Black women face increased risk from heart disease and insulin resistance years before their white counterparts. Elsewhere, McLarin studies the intersections of race and pet ownership, traveling abroad, and applying for gun permits, powerfully exhuming racism’s manifold manifestations with a wicked sense of humor. (After a white woman at McLarin’s mother’s retirement village claims Black people in Antigua weren’t slaves, McLarin balks, “How in the world did she think they got there in the first place? Wrong turn in the North Atlantic? A doomed three-hour tour?”) McLarin is a talent to be reckoned with. (Nov.)