I didn't know that I knew who Franchesca Ramsey was. She started as a YouTube celebrity, and she hit the big time with a couple of viral videos, one being Shit White Girls Say to Black Girls. If you were active on the internet and social media in 2012 you saw it or knew about it. She was also a writer and correspondent on the Larry Wilmore show and was on Broad City.

Ramsey calls herself and "accidental activist," but I feel like she's too hardcore and prepared to be accidental. In her chapter about calling people out, she pulls out some tight social science: Kevin Munger's Tweetment Effects on the Tweeted: Experimentally Reducing Racist Harassment study that showed that "people are more receptive to criticism when it comes from someone who looks like them (lmk if you want a copy of this paywalled article).

Munger began to search particular racial slurs on Twitter. Switching off between Gregs and Rasheeds [names of Twitter bots], he responded to users who had a history of racist harassment with the same message:

@[racist person] Hey man, just remember that there are real people who are hurt when you harass them with that kind of language.

Ramsey had a run as a caller outer and was also viciously trolled (presumably still is). She writes that discovering the quotation, "Be who you needed when you were younger" had a powerful impact on her "work across comedy, social justice, and beauty." This wisdom comes in her chapter on Black women and natural hair, or you might want to say Black girls and natural hair, as it's a bit of a personal hair history, as well as a thoughtful piece on hair empowerment for Black people in modern times, per this example:

In 2017, two sixteen-year-old twin sisters at a charter school in Massachusetts were told their braided hair extensions were 'distracting' and in violation of the dress code. When they refused to 'fix' their hair, they were banned from extracurriculars and prom and threatened with suspension.

I love a person who can separate legitimate anger from gratuitous viciousness, usually regarding a person's body. Ramsey, like a lot of people, found fault with Lena Dunham hand shared it on Twitter. She didn't come out and say "P.S. You're fat," but she skirted around it. Upon being seated next to Dunham at a party, she came clean, with Dunham and herself and took physical insults out of her comedy. I would like all comedians, including some of the political comics I love most (looking at you, Samantha Bee), would follow suit.

I borrowed her book despite not knowing who exactly she was because I like social/political/comic essay. Except I forgot that I often get tired of them after a while. Ramsey and her book are topical, funny, and smart--three of the things I want in a book. I just found her essays were repetitive. I'm hard on comedian essays, though, so you'll probably want to stick with it. 3.5 rounded up to 4.