How to Be Black
by Baratunde Thurston
A self-help book that takes race apart.
For you if
you need to laugh about race before you can talk about it.
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Thurston treats 'being Black' as an instruction manual and takes it apart, chapter by chapter: how to be the Black friend, the Black voter, the Black employee, the Black person in a white neighborhood. He grew up in Washington, DC, raised by a single mother, and uses his own life, plus a panel of other Black voices, to turn the self-help form against itself. It's funny first, then it leaves a mark.
Where This Book Lives
Thurston was a digital director at The Onion and co-founded Jack & Jill Politics. The book is from 2012 and some pop-culture references have aged, but the structure still works. It's a humor book that does the work of an essay collection, and a good way in for readers who find the heavier race books hard to start.
Related Viewing
Shares a topic, theme, or setting with this book in the catalog.
Dear White People(2014)
dir. Justin Simien
Same themes: Identity Performance, Race and Identity
Campus satire about being Black in white rooms.
At the fictional Ivy League Winchester University, a student named Sam White hosts a campus radio show called Dear White People, and a blackface party blows the campus open. The film follows four Black students working out who they are in a place that wants them to be one thing. A campus satire played straight, with sharp jokes and no easy heroes.
Why it’s here: The film takes the 'post-racial' campus story and shows how every Black student is asked to perform one version of themselves. What's punk is that the satire turns on its own heroes too. What's pedagogical is the vocabulary it gives you: code-switching, respectability, who gets to define blackness. It sits next to Sorry to Bother You in the catalog.
Where to watch: Free on Kanopy, Hoopla; Prime VideoLetterboxd ↗
Best in Show(2000)
dir. Christopher Guest
Same theme: Comedy and Performance
Dog show devotion, played entirely straight-faced.
Five eccentric owners and their dogs compete at the prestigious Mayflower Kennel Club Dog Show, in a mockumentary that never winks at its own joke.
Why it’s here: An ensemble of oddballs taken completely seriously by the camera, which is the whole joke and also the whole warmth — nobody here gets to be a punchline without also getting to be a person.
Where to watch: Rent on Fandango at Home, Apple TVLetterboxd ↗
Same pattern, different era
Different time, different place. The same thing keeps happening.
Aké: The Years of Childhood
Wole Soyinka
A colonial childhood, one question at a time.
✦ READ – REFLECT → RESIST
Dear Martin
Nic Stone
Letters to MLK from a kid in handcuffs.
✦ READ – REFLECT → RESIST
Know My Name: A Memoir
Chanel Miller
She took her name back from the case.
✦ READ – REFLECT → RESIST
Lives on the Boundary: The Struggles and Achievements of America’s Educationally Underprepared
Mike Rose
The kids school labels remedial are not dumb.
✦ READ – REFLECT → RESIST
For the family bookshelf
Same idea, written for a younger reader. Good for reading together.
Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic
Alison Bechdel
The memoir that made the closet visible.
✦ READ – REFLECT → RESIST
Ghost Boys
Jewell Parker Rhodes
A boy killed by police tells it himself.
✦ READ – REFLECT → RESIST
New Kid
Jerry Craft
Middle school, race, and real talk.
✦ READ – REFLECT → RESIST
Piecing Me Together
Renée Watson
She earned the scholarship. She's tired of being the diversity program.
✦ READ – REFLECT → RESIST