““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
“Jill Louise Busby’s Unfollow Me reminds me of just how much courage I lack. It forced me to challenge who I’ve presented myself as, and to confront the invisible but thick tether between irreverence and conformity, especially as it pertains to conversations and stances around identity and technology. Busby’s voice is sharp, but what’s sharper is the feeling that Busby is asking us to complicate our arguments and muster up the moxie to sort and see our many selves in a more honest light. And for that, I am grateful.” ―Jason Reynolds, # 1 New York Times bestselling author
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”
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.
Available now!