Best fiction podcast gold award winner,
Miss Experience White
is an illustrated, surrealistic political poem cycle about destroying the demon of white supremacy and dealing with white privilege.
The book version, with 20 full color illustrations in different styles by Berkeley artist John Seabury, is designed to look like a children's book but made for adults. Using a variety of accessible poetic forms, Johnson reveals how Whites like herself with deep ancestral roots in the U.S. might work through feelings of shame, discomfort, and ambivalence to transform them into positive, constructive actions.
The dramatic podcast version won several awards in 2022 including a
Signal Gold Award for Best Fiction in a Limited Series
and a
w3 Silver Award for Cause Awareness in a Miniseries.
As described in the Introduction, Johnson began writing obsessively in 2018 when she saw what Donald Trump was bringing out in many White people and the harm it was causing to so many others.
The Prologue begins:
"In 2016 / The reptiles ate my cousins / But that was Florida / I thought I was safe here"
In Part I, "Vision & Revelation," Miss Experience White clumsily summons the demon of white supremacy, Tyrannosaurus Wonderbread, and his Pearly White Retinue, calling them out with the best of intentions. In the satirical poem "Reptile Show," some of these monsters bear a resemblance to living political figures-and one family in particular. These magical exploits lead her to a harsh and heroic realization.
Part II, "Bonfire of the Ancestors," chronicles the roots and growth of white supremacy and privilege in her ancestral lines. By purifying her historical awareness, Experience creates a clear warrior consciousness to fight Wonderbread and win. Johnson spent months researching her own ancestry for this epic poem. Exclusively for the book, Johnson added the appendix, "Your Fire Goes Here: How to Do Your Own Bonfire of the Ancestors," a set of instructions for a fire purification ritual created for Americans with problematic ancestors.
Part III, "The Other Feast," begins with "Thanksgiving with the Whites," the familiar family fight over politics expressed as a war of limericks. Next comes the phantasmagoric battle to defeat Tyrannosaurus Wonderbread and his Retinue juxtaposed against real-life stories about othering and recognizing privilege. Is the core of the White American experience a fundamental fear of change? Or perhaps a seed of enlightenment demanding we evolve?
Read
to find out.