A trenchant, honest, and unique memoir about body image, fashion, and Blackness.” —Kirkus Reviews (starred review)
“Former BET style director Prescod lays bare the toxic scaffolding of the fashion and beauty industries in her piercing debut…As she reckons with [these] small- and large-scale oppressions, Prescod maintains a striking self-awareness and even hope that these problems have solutions. The result is sure to galvanize those who are looking to make change from within fraught spaces.” —Publishers Weekly
“An eye-opening account of growing up in an elite white community and her career in fashion, where racist beauty standards are the norm.” —USA Today
“A former BET style director reflects on the racism she internalized growing up in a mostly white environment, the toxicity of society’s beauty standard and how she freed herself.” —People Magazine
“Fashion industry and beauty expert, Danielle Prescod, dives into the reality of being a Black woman in the industry in a refreshing and brutally honest memoir.” —Glamour
“[Prescod] didn’t know she’d one day become a fashion media icon. Or that she’d have to face white supremacy and coworkers asking racist questions on a daily basis. This is her story of recovery—from perfection and from white supremacy.” —Buzzfeed
“Prescod has come through the other side with wisdom to share about how to come into your true gorgeous self.” —Los Angeles Times
“Through powerful anecdotes, Prescod details how being whittled down to just her race led her down dangerous paths of an eating disorder and internalized misogyny she regrets putting other women through…Token Black Girl faces the harsh realities of the media scene and empowers young women to fight to see change.” —POPSUGAR
“Token Black Girl isn’t just a fashion memoir or a manifesto about racism—it’s also a specific look at the kind of society that Black girls live in. The book also offers a portrait of a woman grappling with the physical and emotional consequences of being raised in a world where whiteness was seen as more desirable, more acceptable. Prescod takes an unflinching look at how the fashion industry has upheld and continues to uphold whiteness, but also offers a guide to how things can improve.” —Coveteur
“More than just another media memoir, Token Black Girl also explores how Prescod broke her own destructive cycles and found ways to heal from not just toxic work experiences but a toxic culture at large.” —Town & Country
“In the refreshingly frank memoir, Prescod examines her life as a Black woman forced to confront the influence of media and its effect on her mental health and body image. Using anecdotes from her own life, Prescod’s memoir emphasizes the prevalence of white supremacy in our daily lives and especially in the fashion and beauty industries.” —Marie Claire
“Prescod candidly chronicles her life growing up as the “token Black girl” in a largely white, upper-class area in Connecticut to making it as a magazine editor in her adult life. She provides a razor-sharp look at the racist, toxic systems within the fashion and publishing industries. And lays bare the devastating effects it had on her mental and physical health” —The Skimm
“Human beings contain multitudes, and there are innumerable ways to show up as a Black woman in the world…I praise Prescod, who came up in a racially oppressive environment, for breaking free and finding her own definition.” —Nneka McGuire, Washington Post
“With wit and the sharp eye of a woman who has lived through it, Prescod’s memoir takes the reader into the places and institutions of privilege where the idea of the Token Black Girl thrives. Literally shrinking herself to conform to the expectations of those around her, Prescod’s experience feels both unsettlingly familiar and incendiary. This is an essential read to understand how beauty standards and media industry affect Black women in America.” —Gabrielle Union, author of You Got Anything Stronger?
“Sometimes it feels like we are just beginning to discuss the full extent of the Black experience in America, and with a frankness and a brave ability to stare down her own truth, Danielle Prescod has vividly detailed a portrait of Black womanhood that feels so familiar and yet so rarely discussed. It’s time! In her firsthand account of what it’s like to live as a Black person in the middle of whiteness, Danielle suffers no fools and holds back no punches as she explores the humor, WTFs, and emotional repercussions of coming of age as she did. As a memoirist and cultural critic, she deftly keeps things from feeling like a collection of the aha-ha moments you have in therapy, and instead, through her experience, offers people a way out of their token Black friend role (self-inflicted, structural, or otherwise.)” —Allison P. Davis, senior writer for the Cut
“In an honest, relatable, and enlightening fashion, Danielle eloquently speaks about an experience many of us know too well. This pointed memoir reveals the struggle of being a Black woman in a world that tends to praise everything opposite of what you are. This is necessary reading for all women navigating social constructs while simultaneously learning to love themselves out loud.” —Taylor Rooks, Emmy Award–nominated sports journalist and host of the Bleacher Report
“Danielle Prescod candidly shares her experience from growing up in a predominately white environment to then working in a white-dominant industry and how those experiences impacted her identity formation throughout the years. Her story made me feel seen as it is honest and relatable and will leave you mulling over your own experience with self-discovery in a world where we all strive for perfection and to ‘fit in.’ Token Black Girl is a must-read for anyone who has felt like a ‘token’ in society.” —Hannah Bronfman, entrepreneur, author, and founder of HBFIT
“With her richly introspective debut, Token Black Girl, Danielle Prescod reveals devastating and lingering childhood traumas in evidentiating the racist structures central to the psychological gymnastics that the Black community must navigate in order to exist and thrive in the United States.” —Tamu McPherson, fashion consultant and All The Pretty Birds founder
“First, this book should and will be taught in schools and universities. The way Danielle deftly discusses internal and external racism is masterful. She’s like a hip university professor who, instead of barraging you with sleep-inducing soliloquies, talks to you as both a human and friend…And lastly, and what speaks to me most loudly, is that Danielle doesn’t shy away from her own flaws and misgivings. In fact, she shines a bright light on them, which takes a particular type of courage that you can’t help but admire. This is a book that doesn’t only reflect our past but also our present, while giving us the tools to build a better future.” —Mateo Askaripour
05/30/2022
Former BET style director Prescod lays bare the toxic scaffolding of the fashion and beauty industries in her piercing debut. Growing up in 1990s Westchester, N.Y., in a Black, upper-middle-class family, Prescod was ostracized by her mostly white peers at school, many of whom subjected her to taunts about her hair, skin color, and body. These micro- and macro-aggressions followed her beyond high school, into college at Tufts and the competitive office spaces of fashion magazines, including Teen Vogue, where she was pigeonholed as what one fashion director deemed “a girl with a ‘cool downtown urban vibe’.” In candid, often devastating scenes, Prescod details how the emotional toll this took on her led to an eating disorder, binge drinking, and directing toward other women the same behavior directed at her, critiquing them for their styles and their weights. By the time she became an editor at Elle.com at age 25, Prescod realized that the racist culture of her youth was codified into media institutions, visible in one manager’s refusal to hire models of color, and colleagues’ ignorant questions about her hair (“OMG, so cute, but is it going to look like this all the time?”). As she reckons with these small- and large-scale oppressions, Prescod maintains a striking self-awareness and even hope that these problems have solutions. The result is sure to galvanize those who are looking to make change from within fraught spaces. (Oct.)
★ 2022-05-24
A Black fashion reporter describes how White supremacy led to her crippling perfectionism and subsequent eating disorder.
Growing up in Connecticut, from a young age, Prescod assumed the role of the “token Black girl” in her mostly White group of friends. Sometimes she was forced to play the role of Scary Spice, the only Black Spice Girl, during pretend play. Other times she discovered her classmates’ racist attitudes on three-way phone calls. Years of being teased about her alleged tendency to act White made her jumpy around her Black peers, eliminating the possibility of a safe haven away from her school friends. Due to this isolation, she “became manipulative, calculating, and mean. I was desperate to gain some modicum of control, and to do that, I constantly doled out criticisms, gossiped, and stirred up petty drama. I developed a haughty affect that I employed for both passing judgment and my own protection.” Her sharpness turned out to be an invaluable weapon not only for hiding her internalized racism from her peers, but also for her professional success in the fashion industry. Eventually, though, her ambition and self-hatred morphed into debilitating depression and an eating disorder. “I was in dogged pursuit of an imagined sense of power,” she writes, “and was very mean in doing so….But I wonder now if I was always meanest to myself.” Prescod left the fashion industry for a job at the TV network BET, a move she now sees as the first step on her long, slow recovery. Throughout the text, the author exhibits an impeccable clarity of thought, drawing thoughtful and original connections between institutionalized racism and her personal experience. Her voice is frank, vulnerable, and witty, and she has a talent for using humor to poke fun at her past self while simultaneously underscoring the depth of the systemic violence she was forced to endure.
A trenchant, honest, and unique memoir about body image, fashion, and Blackness.