You Get What You Pay for

"Dubbed a voice of her generation, poet and writer Morgan Parker has spent much of her adulthood in therapy, trying to square the resonance of her writing with the alienation she feels in nearly every aspect of life, from her lifelong singleness to her battle with depression. She traces this loneliness to an inability to feel truly safe with others and a historic hyper-awareness stemming from the effects of slavery. In this collection of sharp, reflective essays, Parker examines America's cultural history and relationship to Black Americans through the ages, through such topics as the Church's role in propagating segregation through scriptural misreadings, the implications of Bill Cosby's fall from grace in a culture predicated on acceptance through respectability, and the pitfalls of visibility as seen through the mischaracterizations of Serena Williams as alternately iconic and too ambitious"--