Baratunde Thurston, How To Be Black
Featured Book
An attempt to re-complicate blackness
Attention, black people. Listen up, white people. Hey, everybody. Baratunde Thurston — author, political blogger, cable-news talking head, comedian, tech nerd and the digital director of The Onion — knows what you know and what you think you know about black people in America. He’s got 30-plus years experience as an African American. He’s heard the same things you have, from the stereotypes and the sad-but-trues to the diluted history lessons and popularly accepted narratives. And he’s not buying them.
“In the age of President Barack Obama, all of them are limiting and simply inadequate to the task of capturing the reality of blackness,” he writes in the introduction to this funny, poignant, biting (and a little bit baiting) memoir/satire. “In this book, I will attempt to re-complicate blackness.”
From there he intertwines his personal journey (raised by his mom, simultaneously enrolled in a mostly white prep school and a “black power boot camp,” cleaned toilets/took classes at Harvard) with sometimes silly, but more often straight-faced and subtly scathing, chapters like “How to Be the Black Friend,” “How to Be the Black Employee,” and “How to Speak for All Black People.” Along the way he solicits input from a “Black Panel” of experts, mostly fellow writers and comedians (and all black except for that dude who wrote Stuff White People Like). There are plenty of tiny heartbreaking and hackle-raising moments in How To Be Black — race is serious business in America, after all — but the book is also funny as hell.
