Virtual Event: Jill Louise Busby

Harvard Book Store, Politics and Prose, and Books & Books welcome acclaimed critic and filmmaker JILL LOUISE BUSBY for a discussion of her highly anticipated, debut essay collection, Unfollow Me: Essays on Complicity. She will be joined in conversation by JASON REYNOLDS, bestselling author of Long Way Down and, with Ibram X. Kendi, Stamped: Racism, Antiracism, and You. 

Ticketing

There are two ticket options available for this event.

Admission Ticket - $31.00: Includes one admission link and one copy of Unfollow Me. U.S. shipping also included. Books will be shipped to ticket-holders following the event. Please note: we are unable to ship internationally.

Pay-What-You-Can Ticket: Includes one admission link. We suggest a $5 donation to support Harvard Book Store's staff and our virtual event series during these difficult times. Thank you for your support!

About Unfollow Me

Jill Louise Busby spent years in the nonprofit sector specializing in Diversity & Inclusion. She spoke at academic institutions, businesses, and detention centers on the topics of Race, Power, and Privilege and delivered over two-hundred 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.

Praise for Unfollow Me

“Jill lets us know out the gate that she ain't come to play. This book is real, raw, and unrelenting. Dark, satirical, full of brilliance and bad ass'ness. Now is definitely not the time to be unfollowing Jill.” —Killer Mike

“For anyone who has ever heard they were too much, not enough, and right on time all in the same day, this book will assure you that you're not crazy. A pleasure, even in all its painful, powerful truths.” —Meshell Ndegeocello

“Busby has gifted us words that sing on the page with the insightful, poetic, and witty euphony that many of us have come to appreciate from her creative content online. Unfollow Me demands a follow, a like, a heart emoji, and a reader who is not afraid to be floored by Busby's incisive take on so many old inequities that ghost us still.” —Darnell L. Moore, author of No Ashes in the Fire: Coming of Age Black & Free in America