Unfollow Me

Essays on Complicity

By: Jill Louise Busby

Narrated by: Jill Louise Busby

Length: 4 hrs and 44 mins

Publisher's summary

An intimate, impertinent, and incisive collection about race, progress, and hypocrisy from Jill Louise Busby, a.k.a. Jillisblack.

Jill Louise Busby spent years in the nonprofit sector specializing in diversity and inclusion. She spoke at academic institutions, businesses, and detention centers on the topics of race, power, and privilege and delivered over 200 workshops to nonprofit organizations all over the California Bay Area.

In 2016, fed up with what passed as progressive in the Pacific Northwest, Busby uploaded a one-minute video about race, white institutions, and faux liberalism to Instagram. The video received millions of views across social platforms. As her pithy persona Jillisblack became an "it voice" weighing in on all things race-based, Jill began to notice parallels between her performance of "diversity" in the white corporate world and her performance of "wokeness" for her followers. Both, she realized, were scripted.

Unfollow Me is a memoir-in-essays about these scripts; it's about tokenism, micro-fame, and inhabiting spaces - real and virtual, Black and White - where complicity is the price of entry. Busby's social commentary manages to be both wryly funny and achingly open-hearted as she recounts her shape-shifting moves among the subtle hierarchies of progressive communities. Unfollow Me is a sharply personal and self-questioning critique of white fragility (and other words for racism), respectability politics (and other words for shame), and all the places where fear masquerades as progress.

©2021 Jill Louise Busby (P)2021 Audible, Inc.

Great memoir and performance

I was not familiar with Jillisblack but the excerpts in this book showed me enough of her that I don’t think we’d be friends. Jill Louise Busby is another story. A really great memoir that delves into race, Internet fame and insecurity. My favorite chapters were the one about her family and the conversation with a “Proud Boy.” I love that Jill grows in the course of the narrative and the writing is lyrical and incisive.

So glad I got the audible, too!

I gave my hardback copy away to a young, queer, biracial girl who asked if she could read it. Decided I wanted to listen to the book as a second “look”. So glad I did. I love Jill and appreciate her honesty and eloquent way of sharing the stories that resonate with all of us. At least me. I appreciate this book. Thank you.

Unique

Stumbled upon this gem as if by accident, but I know better. I am grateful to have heard a lot of my internal dialogue voiced by someone twice as eloquent and half as insecure.

I think this should be a required text for influencers everywhere and for Black people stationed in predominantly white spaces. I’m certain that some personality types will eventually find this book and will proceed to do what the internet does best. But others, if honest, will find a piece of their own alter ego lurking in every monologue.

I recommend this book to anyone who finds themselves in the throes of fame, to anyone dealing with the muted failures of a resounding success story, to anyone who loves their mother and needs to be reminded of it, to anyone who is heading out on their path unsure of what they are searching for, to anyone who is hella sarcastic and enjoys dry humor, to the other, to the many, to anyone who has two things to say and only one mouth to say it with.

Thank You Jill

I have followed Jill for years on Instagram. I've always enjoyed her delivery with her essays, so naturally I decided that the audible version would be best. I'm glad she was able to put this book out. It's something I needed to hear. I like that she was able to give parts of herself without giving it all. I found pieces of me within it. Thank you Jill.