America Made Me a Black Man
A Memoir
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- 89,99 zł
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- 89,99 zł
Publisher Description
NAACP Image Award Nominee · NPR Best Book of 2022
A searing memoir of American racism from a Somalian-American who survived hardships in his birth country only to experience firsthand the dehumanization of Blacks in his adopted land, the United States.
“No one told me about America.”
Born in Somalia and raised in a valley among nomads, Boyah Farah grew up with a code of male bravado that helped him survive deprivation, disease, and civil war. Arriving in America, he believed that the code that had saved him would help him succeed in this new country. But instead of safety and freedom, Boyah found systemic racism, police brutality, and intense prejudice in all areas of life, including the workplace. He learned firsthand not only what it meant to be an African in America, but what it means to be African American. The code of masculinity that shaped generations of men in his family could not prepare Farah for the painful realities of life in the United States.
Lyrical yet unsparing, America Made Me a Black Man is the first book-length examination of American racism from an African outsider’s perspective. With a singular poetic voice brimming with imagery, Boyah challenges us to face difficult truths about the destructive forces that threaten Black lives and attempts to heal a fracture in Black men’s identity.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
An African immigrant reflects on American racism in this vitriolic memoir. Poet and essayist Farah fled from war-torn Somalia to Boston with his family at age 15 in the early 1990s, giddy with "love for America." That gratitude soured because of microaggressions by a standoffish white college roommate and police macroaggressions, including an unjust speeding ticket and a wrongful accusation of creating a disturbance. Worst of all was what he perceived as workplace racial bias that led to his firing. Farah braids in reminiscences of Somalia's violence—"the young man... was stoned to death before my very eyes"—painting it as less toxic than American bigotry, whose "legacy of poisoned black blood and screams of horror leaves its mark upon the crime-ridden conscience of white Americans" and will "carry them off either to destitution or to the madhouse." Farah's feverish prose can sound inflated in its denunciations of "racist ghouls" who "surround me, prowl around inside me," and his narrative, which incorporates composite characters, compressed timelines, altered circumstances, and invented dialogue, doesn't always ring true in its allegations of racism ("She has been raised by white monkeys," he writes of a Black lawyer who advised him that his employment-discrimination claim was weak). The result is less a realistic account of racial divisions than a vivid portrait of the paranoia they inspire.