Such a Fun Age by Kiley Reid is a story about Emira, a 25-year-old African American working as a nanny for a white family. One night while at a supermarket with the baby she nannies, she is confronted and accused of kidnapping. The scene is recorded by a well-meaning bystander, and the series of events that follow raise a lot of questions about race and the ingrained biases in our culture.
Throughout the story, Emira is struggling to find her identity and gain a sense of power over her life, both of which are complicated by the injustices that she is facing. A big theme in the story is othering and the One. Emira is othered in several senses. When she is accused of kidnapping at the beginning, she is being accused because she is a black woman with a white child. This is the kind of othering that we are used to, where someone is societally wrong in some form or another. Another example of othering that comes up is fetishizing someone because they are different. In the book we will see Emira fetishized by both her boss and a love interest because of her skin color.
Emira’s boss Alix, the mother of the baby she nannies, sees herself as the One throughout the book. She thinks that she knows what is best for Emira. Whether that has to do with her love life, her friends, or what she should do in her future, Alix is constantly trying to get involved. She ends up being the cause of a lot of events in Emira’s life that she is not happy or comfortable with. By observing Alix and Emira’s relationship, we can see a good example of privileged white women guilt, fetishizing the black friend, and a whole host of microaggressions committed throughout the story.
At times the book can be hard to read, since the characters are so unaware of the aggressions they are committing against Emira and the fools they are making of themselves. Such a Fun Age is a really good read to get a better understanding of what racism can look like when it’s not overt and obvious, but still extremely impactful, and it reaffirms that there is still othering between races in America.
Hello!
I think that it is really upsetting that stories like this happen. It is awful that some people assume that a child is being kidnapped just because their race does not match their caretaker’s. I think that people need to be much more conscious about the fact that adoption and nannying are things that exist, and race does not matter when it comes to family.
Great job!
This type of situation happens everyday in life and its a shame. there was an example of this on a southwest airliner where this lady had a black child and they called the authorities on her to say that she kidnapped a child also in a grocery store this lady was detained because she had a white child and was accused of kidnapping. If the child seems content and knows this person don’t assume because of the different in race due to the fact that child could be adopted or a step child no body knows.