You Get What You Pay For

Starred review from April 15, 2024
For African Americans, “becoming a person, forming an identity” is a “sham assignment from the start,” according to this graceful and deeply personal essay collection from National Book Critics Circle Award–winning poet Parker (Magical Negro). Cataloging a lifetime’s worth of mental health struggles, Parker teases out the disadvantage Black Americans are at psychologically (“Before you can ‘find yourself,’ you have to first find the fake self and question how it got put there”). Among other gut-wrenching recollections that center on mental health and racism, she recounts facing pushback for wanting to go to therapy as a teen (“If Blackness was essentially defined by resilience through unimaginable struggle, what indeed did I really have to cry about?”) and an incident where white classmates pointed and laughed at an extension
that had fallen out of her hair (“For me, a serious function of racism is embarrassment.... I mean wanting to be erased”). These memories are presented in fluid tandem with Parker’s astute reflections on such pop culture figures as Serena Williams and Bill Cosby, resulting in a brilliant excavation of the profound link between Black identity and Black mental health (“You see yourself as something to be corrected rather than someone to be helped”) that doubles as a harrowing expression of the relentlessly damaging personal impact of racism. This is breathtaking.