One of Our Kind by Nicola Yoon will make your head spin in good ways and bad
SPOILERS SPOILERS SO MANY SPOILERS STOP BEFORE A SINGLE WORD UNLESS YOU WANT SPOILERS
One of Our Kind by Nicola Yoon is a good read. It’s a horror story in which Jazmyn, a socially-conscious public defender who has built a life and an identity around Blackness and pro-Black community activism, is persuaded by her like-minded husband Kingston to move to Liberty, a city built by and for Black people, where all the shops are Black-owned and all the police are Black, where every student at the school is Black and her young son joyfully tells her he finally fits in.
The “horror” aspect of the story takes the shape of doubt: Liberty isn’t what she thought it would be. None of her neighbors seem particularly interested in pro-Black causes. Many of them “dress white” and “talk white” and relax their hair. Moving there seems to have changed her husband — he shaved off his afro, and his priorities are different: he’s no longer as committed to mentoring Black youth, and instead has devoted himself to spending long hours at Liberty’s “Wellness Center,” which looms over the whole story like a lightning-shadowed vampiric cathedral at the top of a sunny Southern California hill.
I devoured this book: it raises interesting questions about how we balance (or don’t) obligations to our communities against obligations to our families against obligations to ourselves — to our sense of self, but also to our physical comfort, the dreaded “self-care” that haunts the story like an army of Satanic candy-apples.
It also shows, from the inside out, how a person experiences uncomfortable changes in their sense of themself: when Jazmyn and Kingston go back to LA to meet friends for dinner, Jazmyn wants to skip the valet and self park a few blocks away, like they used to, before they had all this money. But then she finds herself fearful of a homeless encampment, and then reproachful of herself for feeling fear.
Safety is a theme of the story — the precipitating event that gets Jazmyn to agree to move to Liberty is a terrifying encounter with a white policeman, with the whole family, father, pregnant mother, and young son, in the car. She can so easily imagine every way that the encounter results in one, two, three deaths. After this terror, she finally decides that living in a “bougie” Black town like Liberty will be worth it, because it means all the cops will be Black, and also she won’t always be followed around by store security — and in fact she won’t face any of the other daily indignities that come with being Black in America.
But it’s clear that Jazmyn can never feel safe, so long as she’s got a phone in her pocket. She receives alerts and updates, and when a cop kills a Black father and shoots his daughter in a similar traffic stop, and when the little girl later dies in the hospital, she feels the pain like it’s happening to her, because she’s so much a part of The Black Community that it IS happening to her. Which she’s proud of. And she’s very, very upset with any other Black person who doesn’t feel the same way.
When another parent at the school doesn’t want to watch the video of the policeman shooting this man and his daughter, she questions the woman’s Blackness. In that moment of upset, she categorizes the woman’s curl type and reverse-paper-bag-tests her face. She also makes assumptions about her lack of experience with violence — that turn out to be wrong. But by then it’s really hard to sympathize with Jazmyn, because SHE doesn’t know if she’s right or wrong, and she’s the one judging everyone around her so harshly.
We see in this story, as in life, that one person’s trauma does not result in the same response as another’s. One person might howl with pain; another might use her money and power to take away other people’s Blackness. Supervillains always have compelling origin stories, you know.
And here’s where I should point out that while police shootings affecting Black lives are very real, here, in our real world, there’s a lot in this story that isn’t. This novel takes place in an alternate universe where Southern California’s pace of development has left a vast city-size tract available for purchase, where “turning someone white” against their will is a medically accomplishable feat, and where the social politics are such that white people have no interest in moving into this wonderful, idyllic, entirely Black town — even tho in our real world Black neighborhoods get bought up and “gentrified” all the time. In our real word, if the utopian all-Black town of Liberty were really created, you couldn’t count to 10 before white families started filing lawsuits about discrimination and white-owned businesses use every route — the courts, lawmakers, popular protest, and more — to move a Cheesecake Factory into Liberty.
But this story is taking place in a different world, and it’s a story: it’s actually kind of like a comic book story, as I suggested earlier, with super-villains who are capable of super-feats of science and power. The question then is, do we want Jazmyn for our (anti)hero?
Jazmyn’s husband, Kingston, asks at one point whether she’s just being “Blacker-than-thou.” When she complains about this to her best friend, the best friend seems to agree that he has a point; worse, the best friend thinks, actually, we all need a break from the stress of the rest of the world sometimes. Oh my. Jazmyn doesn’t take well to that. The comic book anti-hero that Jazmyn reminds me most of is Rorschach from The Watchmen: he’s utterly unlikeable and utterly wrong about everything — EXCEPT the giant evil plot taking place and how bad it is. Rorschach discovers a plot to “save the world” by killing half the people in it and terrifying the survivors into cooperation. Every other “hero” in that story is willing to stand by and let this happen for the “greater good” — Rorschach has to be killed so he doesn’t get in the way.
But the difference is that Rorschach was a vigilant vigilante crime-fighter whose moral sense was bodily, not abstract. For him there was no “greater good” — that all is bullshit; he’s an animal reacting to moral offenses in real time. Jazmyn’s “problem” in this story, the thing that fates her to lose herself — to die really, even if there will exist afterwards “a white woman who used to be Jazmyn” — is that she’s not reactive enough, that she doesn’t trust her instincts, that she accepts it (a bit) when others tell her she needs to relax and get a break — or a massage! — and not FEEL every trauma that happens to every Black person everywhere.
Because stepping back from her vigilance is Jazmyn’s major “mistake” in the story, it’s inevitably the book’s major message: never take breaks, self-care is betrayal of your people, if you’re not conscious of your Blackness (which means your trauma) every second of your life, you will lose yourself.
More than one person in the story asks Jazmyn who she’d be without her trauma — she’s offended, enraged, by the question. It’s clear that for Jazmyn to be Black is to be traumatized, and that that trauma must be cared for, preserved, even nurtured. One of the two like-minded friends she makes in Liberty, Charles, has (when she first meets him) a three-room museum wing in his mansion filled with the Art of Black American life, whose centerpiece is an enormous painting of the aftermath of a lynching. This curation of the pain of kidnapping, rape, murder and suppression represents what’s going on in his and Jazmyn’s minds: History is Identity, and it must be preserved; never forget! Never relax. Never let your guard down. It super freaks her out when Charles shaves off his locs, loses interest in BLM, and has the museum wing removed and replaced with a home spa. To the reader, this might be all just a little heavy-handed.
Jazmyn watches two friends change radically, and one husband change slowly, but she keeps putting off moving out of Liberty. She packs a bag, then sets it aside. She says we’re leaving now! Then, tomorrow! Then, this weekend at the latest!
In the end, this is what the story will be about: Jazmyn’s crime is that she let her guard down, she made excuses for the people around her who abandoned their Blackness, especially Kingston; she entertained the idea of self-care and comfort; she even Got A Massage. As a result she and her children will be operated upon by the skin graft specialist, reconstructive surgeon, voice coach, and neuroscientist who together with a venture capitalist founded Liberty. The neuroscientist has identified the locations in her brain where her Blackness-related trauma lies. This team will make her fully white: they’ll give her a new name in the fashion of a “witness protection relocation,” send her and her family away from Liberty, and she won’t remember ever being Black. They will go from “Black excellence” to “white anonymity.” This team will make her children white, and they also won’t remember a thing. And finally they will make Kingston white; yet he WILL remember who he is and where he’s from and what he’s done — this is important, just in case of emergency.
And with that, the story ends.
The story is immediately followed by an author’s note claiming that she wants this book to result in conversations — and take a look at what’s going on at Good Reads and you’ll see the readers are here to oblige. Some readers decry the whole book as anti-Black, some think it doesn’t live up to its model The Stepford Wives. Some just hate the ending. But it’s definitely got people talking. And I think that just sitting down to try to articulate WHY this book bothers you is a good and healthy exercise for your soul.
Like many readers, I’m stirred up by what I read as the “message” or “moral” of the story, which SEEMS to be that Blackness equals trauma, and that trauma must be cultivated into a state of constantly-triggered PTSD because to live otherwise is not Black, and is not safe — from being turned white; the book also seems to be suggesting that becoming white is a kind of end-point at which all one’s problems evaporate: “Whitely Ever After.”
I won’t go as far as the Good Reads reviewer who said they wished a better author wrote the book (ouch), but I feel like the book leaves a (at least one) whole other story implied but not written. I truly hope she decides to write it.
What would it be like to be Kingston? Or any other “sponsor” (this is what they call the family member who keeps their memories in case of emergency). The “sponsor” lives the rest of their lives knowing who they are while their spouse and children have had their memories erased? How lonely would this be? How frustrating?
And what would motivate a desire for such a thing? It’s a desire to completely exchange your family for another, who doesn’t even know you, but also to isolate yourself from them, to no longer share a history and a life with them.
The characters seem to believe that whiteness is more protective than wealth; and that that safety is so valuable it’s worth losing who you are, and your sense of connection to everyone you love. I can imagine the first half of that; I can’t imagine the second half.
I’m also wondering what’s the “long game” for Liberty. Jazmyn and Kingston move in relatively early the city’s history. If the whole enterprise is getting Black families to move in so you can turn them white and then move them back out again, how does the town function? How does the school function? Are kids constantly coming in for half a grade and then moving away? The city services, the restaurants, this is a lot of employee turnover!
So maybe it’s just a select few are getting this procedure that turns them white. Which means the majority of the city really IS a Black utopia where people can live and work without the stress of racism? And the “cost” of this paradise is being borne entirely by the wealthiest families? This is a perspective I’d like to see.
Yet also, even if it’s only a select few families being transformed, the fact that occasionally WHOLE FAMILIES — the wealthiest, most notable families — go missing after living in this town for a few months would certainly raise suspicions. Friends, cousins, co-workers, there are all kinds of people who might wonder where they went. And not being able to find people is not considered normal in the present moment in history. We expect to keep track of everyone we ever knew online. So a person ceasing to exist and being replaced by a white person with a different name and face is hard to believe. Which is not to reject the story; it’s just to say, I want MORE.
SPAS are the symbol of corruption in this novel — not only do the corrupted people all join the community spa, they start building elaborate spas into their homes. The main character objects to “self care” as a culture and it’s presented as replacing religion. So the replacing religion thing is really intriguing, but also: where is the line? Where does self care go from healthy practice to suicide cult? Obviously it comes before you’re turning your three-room museum wing into a fully-plumbed and staffed home spa, but are we to believe that relaxation from total vigilance will be our doom?
Lastly (for now), I have questions about the roles of the city’s founders: they are changing the skin, changing the bone structure, changing the voice, changing the memories, and this is what, we are told, makes someone “white.” So these founders and their respective specialties represent the “essence” of “race” in this story, and they are in a mission to turn all “Black” race features into “white” ones. Each of them has lost a family member to racist violence. In this way they are like a super-villain team whose origin stories are all in their deep personal loss, but their way of dealing with it is all about changing others. They themselves do not abandon their identities and “turn white.” They just do this to others. I’d like to get into these characters’ heads for a while.
My suggestion: make this a series and give us at least three seasons. And put lots of other writers on it, because there’s too many points of view here to ignore.
Do I recommend? Yes, but be prepared to read against the grain.
I'll check this out in the bookstore to gauge my interest, but my first instinct suggests I'd hate this book. Not the themes, but the world-building and plot. I struggle with fantasy/sci-fi because I'm plenty fascinated by our own clusterfuck of a reality.
Great write-up though!
What a great review! I’m gonna read it