The Other Black Girl

Nella Rogers is an editorial assistant at Wagner Books. She encounters countless micro aggressions at work, her diversity initiative elicits alternative examples from the aggrieved staff that include left-handedness and nearsightedness, and she can't help but wonder if her desire to become an editor is hampered by her race. Enter the OBG “Other Black Girl” in Hazel-May McCall. Looking Erykah-meets-Issa with thick locs, a grandfather who died protesting against a 1961 busing bill, and herself founding a Harlem based initiative called “Young, Black ‘n' Lit” Hazel feels to Nella at once more “authentically black” and yet somehow more palatable to her white coworkers with her adept code-switching.

When one of the company's white bestseller's latest work which explores the opioid epidemic lands on her desk, Nella wrestles with how to advise against the cringeworthy, cliched and more than a little racist pregnant black addict stereotype named Shartricia Daniels. With two black women on staff, things should start bending towards progress, but it's not how Nella expects.

This was a fine reading experience that ticks up the tension to full blown thriller, but where it really shines is in the subsequent discussions it elicits. This is something you want to buddy read so you can poke at some of the notions explored within around respectability politics, micro aggressions, diversity in the workplace, and how skinfolk ain't always kinfolk. It's timely too given the recent pressures and protests in publishing around works from Mike Pence, Jonathan Mattingly and Jeanine Cummins.