What Doesnt Kill You Makes You Blacker Review
What Doesn't Kill You Makes Y'all Blacker
A Memoir in Essays
Hardcover, 307 pages |
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For Damon Young — writer, critic, humorist, and the co-founder and editor-in -primary of VerySmartBrothas — being black in America is to "exist in a incessant state of absurdity; a perpetual surreality that twists and contorts and transmutates equilibrium and homeostasis the way an extended stay in space alters human Dna."
Reading his work, one rapidly understands black people perennially struggle to find a space to exhale without the pressure of institutionalized racism. In What Doesn't Kill Yous Makes You lot Blacker, Immature chronicles his efforts to endure the plethora of battles that come with existence black, including expectations about his fighting skills, the need to perform hypermasculinity, and the death of his mother at the hands of a healthcare system that treats African Americans as if they feel no pain.
What Doesn't Impale Yous Makes You Blacker is a deconstruction of Young's diverse neuroses. Young has spent his entire life doubting himself, and the roots of that cocky-doubt tin can be found in the style blackness people are treated and the expectations placed on them by their status equally others, as outsiders. In the 16 essays that brand up the book, Immature pulls readers into his world, showing them his vulnerability, hitting them with unflinching honesty well-nigh the country of race relations in this country, and keeping them glued to the pages with his wit and humor. While this is presented equally a memoir in essays, What Doesn't Kill You Makes You Blacker is more than of a personal collection of independent essays that offer a look at the life of one man. It is also a collection that serves every bit an authentic, peachy, and touching example of the black male experience.
Reading Young's essays is ofttimes an uncomfortable feel considering he doesn't shy abroad from ugly truths. At that place is a lot of funny writing here, but likewise hurting, insecurity, loss, and injustice. For example, Young believes his mother would be live today if she were white because doctors never took her pain seriously, and he proves his signal with historical facts. And just like his female parent's cancer becomes a vehicle to discuss larger cultural bug, Young tackles one of the greatest cancers at the cadre of our country: racism.
"White supremacy is so gargantuan and mundane that sometimes its existence and its proficiency tin can't be measured, addressed, or fifty-fifty seen without a stark change in perspective. It isn't like gravity. Information technology is gravity. Information technology is a ceaseless pressure intended to keep blackness ground-bound and sick."
The notion that black people are tougher and experience no pain is just one of many ideas Young analyzes. From sports to politics, black in America is synonymous with otherness. This otherness is framed by unfairness and preconceived notions that place black people at a disadvantage from the time they are built-in, peculiarly if they're poor because poverty is seen as something that makes them innately stronger:
"If you're poor and black, America acts like y'all emerge from the womb twenty-vii years old, with four kids, five predicate felonies, and a lit Newport already between your lips. White people go to exist babies. And they get to withal be babies when they're adults. Poor black people are born Avon Barksdale."
The beauty of What Doesn't Impale You Makes You lot Blacker is that Young never tries to make information technology like shooting fish in a barrel for readers. He shows his righteous anger. He presents inequality. And he uses the N-word. For him, the Due north-word, which can be a noun, verb, or adjective, must be earned, and earning it is part of black civilisation. More than importantly, the discussion has two variants; i used for friends and one that symbolizes 400 years of oppression. Young thinks agreement the deviation between using the N-word when it ends in -ga and when it ends in -ger is crucial, and he dedicates diverse passages to explaining the difference:
"While the experience of American black is too varied and motley to feign some sort of universality, none of us are immune to the random and haphazard violence of n****r; of being called one, of being treated like one, of being idea of every bit 1. Information technology, like n***a, too transcends condition and station, as fifty-fifty north***as who believe they've somehow escaped and eclipsed northward****r are susceptible to the n****r wake-upwardly telephone call, of having their blankets of perceived privilege yanked from underneath them, hurling them into space while n****r's fell gravity vaporizes them. Information technology'due south through this collective fire that due north***a is earned. We've earned the right to exist it, to phone call each other it, to allow it to permeate our thoughts and our taunts, our minds and our music, our sentences and our souls."
Vocabulary and racial slurs are only two of many spaces in which black and whiteness collide, with the latter usually embodying hegemony. In that location is a chip of that in every essay and that makes the book cohesive. There are two somewhat meandering essays at the cease of the book that could take used a stronger edit, but that aside, What Doesn't Kill Y'all Makes You Blacker is an outstanding drove of nonfiction that encapsulates the black male feel — and demands change.
Immature is a talented writer and sharp cultural critic. He created something special with this timely and powerful book. Information technology, similar the work of bell hooks and Roxane Gay, should be required reading.
Gabino Iglesias is an author, book reviewer and professor living in Austin, Texas. Find him on Twitter at @Gabino_Iglesias.
Source: https://www.npr.org/2019/03/26/706741007/what-doesnt-kill-you-makes-you-blacker-is-a-powerful-look-at-one-black-mans-life
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