Word: nelsons
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There are two newspapers in the United States worth writing for professionally--The New York Times and the Washington Post. Volunteer Slavery, by Jill Nelson is primarily the author's account of her tenure at the latter. It is also a story about Washington and the heavy price it exacts from those who heed its call...
Like many blacks, Nelson, a former free-lance writer for the Village Voice, believed that succeeding in the white corporate world would require emotional gymnastics. But in exchange for a $50,000 salary, she was ready to perform "the standard Negro balancing act when it comes to dealing with white folks, which involves sufficiently blurring the edges of my being enough so that they don't feel intimidated, while simultaneously holding on to my integrity." What Nelson didn't expect was that black males would join with white ones to push her off the tightrope. In her case at least...
...best, Nelson's book reads like a cross between Waiting to Exhale and You'll Never Eat Lunch in This Town Again. It crackles with devastating caricatures of male pomposity, black and white, that help explain why it is so difficult for black women to make themselves heard. There is Nelson's fulminating father, a prosperous dentist who admonished his children to "be number one" while hoisting his middle finger to drive home the point; Post executive editor Ben Bradlee, a "short, gray, wrinkled gnome" whose interviewing technique consisted of droning on about himself instead of asking questions; the black...
Unfortunately, as Nelson writes, she was not always able to help herself adjust to the demands of mainstream journalism. A gifted prose stylist, she could not blend her need to write from a black perspective with the ostensibly objective stance of a conventional daily. Post editors claimed that they recruited Nelson because they valued her viewpoint. But when she wrote wrote anything with a point of view, they usually buried the story in the back pages or didn't publish it. Increasingly frustrated by second-rate assignments and alienated from her peers, Nelson veered toward an emotional breakdown. Her last...
Such self-inflicted torments tend to undermine the credibility of Nelson's assault on biracial sexism. So do a number of unnecessarily graphic revelations about Nelson's frantic sex life and drug abuse, which seem to have been included to pad the manuscript. Despite these flaws, Volunteer Slavery is a compelling firsthand report from the corporate combat zone where racial and sexual lines converge and blur in the most dehumanizing ways...