What Doesn't Kill You Makes You Blacker

[Faith]

One of the newest books on our shelves is What Doesn’t Kill You Makes You Blacker: A Memoir in Essays, in which Damon Young chronicles his "efforts to survive while battling and making sense of the various neuroses his country has given him.

"It’s a condition that’s sometimes stretched to absurd limits, provoking the angst that made him question if he was any good at the “being straight” thing......creating the farce where, as a teen, he wished for a white person to call him a racial slur just so he could fight him and have a great story about it; and generating the surreality of watching gentrification transform his Pittsburgh neighborhood from predominantly Black to “Portlandia . . . but with Pierogies.”

"And, at its most devastating, it provides him reason to believe that his mother would be alive today if she were white.

"From one of our most respected cultural observers, What Doesn’t Kill You Makes You Blacker is a hilarious and honest debut that is both a celebration of the idiosyncrasies and distinctions of Blackness and a critique of white supremacy and how we define masculinity."

Purpose and joy,
Faith Reidenbach, administrator

[Robin Brown]

My copy just came. Can't wait to read it!