After working alongside iconic figures like Diana Ross, Prince, and Maya Angelou and as VIBE’s founding fashion director, Michaela angela Davis provides both a celebration of Black media’s vibrant history and a critical examination of its challenges and identity politics.

On her first day of second grade, a group of older girls surrounded Michaela. The ringleader drafted her little sister, armed her with a pair of scissors, and shouted a command: cut Michaela’s big blond pigtails off or face her fury. Michaela and her braids survived the attempted “jump,” but she never saw the world and hair the same way again.

Recognizing how her light skin, light eyes, and light hair facilitated her access to the explosive intersections of hardcore, house, and hip-hop culture, Michaela angela Davis’s Tenderheaded is the coming-of-age story of a stylist and editor who hustled during the golden age of the downtown NYC scene of the ’80s, established a career through the hip-hop–fueled ’90s, and reckoned with the media industry in the “post-racial” Obama years while being in service to Black women every step of the way.

With a life and career as complex and textured as her hair, Davis has written more than a memoir. A tribute to Black girls and women everywhere, Tenderheaded is a cultural manifesto that reckons with the role media and American history play in the fascinating and chaotic shaping of a collective identity.