In a time of rising anti-Asian hate and a renewal of anti-Black racism, Black and brown solidarity is of critical importance. Political pundits and activists alike have emphasized the urgency of financial, political and even ecological unity among these various ethnic and cultural groups. But in The Way You Make Me Feel: Love in Black and Brown, Nina Sharma calls for another type of Afro-Asian solidarity. In 16 bold, rich essays, Sharma unfurls the chronicle of her love affair with a Black man named Quincy. (Some readers will immediately recognize the dreadlocked man as Quincy Scott Jones, author of poetry collection The T-Bone Series.) Here, we journey to the center of a love story that is as much about romance as it is about Sharma’s Indian identity and wrestling with anti-Blackness.
Sharma adds color and nuance to her essays by braiding TV reviews with cultural commentary and memoir. In the powerful “Not Dead,” she discusses her experience watching “The Walking Dead” and analyzes one particular episode—the one in which the only Asian character in the series, a Korean American father-to-be named Glenn, is killed. She writes of her emotional journey following that episode, how she struggled to eat the meal Quincy lovingly made: “Our Sunday ritual. It wasn’t that my hunger was gone. I’d just had enough.” The episode made her think about another murdered Asian American man, real-life Vincent Chin, who was bludgeoned to death in Detroit in 1982. With grace and grit, she enters the narratives of these two individuals, and uses them to consider her own mortality as a South Asian American.
But in the main, this is a book about love. Sharma shows us that she’s got range, moving seamlessly from a discussion about racism on a national scale to making out with Quincy, for example. Readers will appreciate Sharma’s diaristic recounting of their lovers’ spats and her reflections on the central tension in their relationship: that in the American caste system, a Black man and Indian woman simply do not fit any accepted narrative.
With writing that is at once humorous and profound, The Way You Make Me Feel confronts the paradoxical realities of race and the family, and calls for greater solidarity by way of love.
