How to Be Black
Baratunde Thurston
Language: English
Pages: 272
ISBN: 0062003224
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
The Onion’s Baratunde Thurston shares his 30-plus years of expertise in being black, with helpful essays like “How to Be the Black Friend,” “How to Speak for All Black People,” “How To Celebrate Black History Month,” and more, in this satirical guide to race issues—written for black people and those who love them. Audacious, cunning, and razor-sharp, How to Be Black exposes the mass-media’s insidiously racist, monochromatic portrayal of black culture’s richness and variety. Fans of Stuff White People Like, This Week in Blackness, and Ending Racism in About an Hour will be captivated, uplifted, incensed, and inspired by this hilarious and powerful attack on America’s blacklisting of black culture: Baratunde Thurston’s How to Be Black.
and Malia and Sasha Obama, but when I enrolled, the school’s reputation wasn’t quite as glamorous. I arrived a bit of a fish out of water. While I wasn’t from the deep hood of Southeast DC, by Sidwell standards I was about as hood as it got at the time. I was pretty black, for a black guy. I arrived suffering from a mild medical condition known as “Ebonics” or “Black English Vernacular.” This condition caused me to “axe” people questions and caused the other students to ridicule me. I knew
depends on you. (See the chapters “How to Be The Black Friend” and “How to Be The Black Employee” to further sharpen your skills as racial representative.) Have You Ever Wanted to Not Be Black? Speaking on behalf of black people, being The Black Friend, understanding your place on the scales of blackness—all this can be quite exhausting. Sometimes, and for any number of reasons, you don’t want to be black anymore, even if just for a moment. There can be a certain mental overhead
they cost a serious amount of money. My senior year, however, word spread that Monsieur Gueye* was not going to France that summer, but to his home country of Senegal. This got the attention of every black person associated with Sidwell, and the opportunity was the daily focus of attention in the Thurston household for months until I boarded the plane. For me, bearing an African name, having matriculated through a West African–inspired rites-of-passage program, and being my mother’s son,
all the dumb shit that has happened for years and years. You don’t want the feeling of burden when you turn on the television in February. God forbid you go near the History Channel, and you find out about all the shit that happened to all of your people! You don’t want it. So, the idea of this time when it’s all over is very intoxicating. It’s easy. In a weird way, I would love to argue for it because I wouldn’t have to discuss the dumb shit. But it’s also putting your head in the sand, and
between us and the U.S., and as much as others may try to push us away and claim directly or indirectly that we’re not “real Americans,” that line of thinking is patently false and is a disservice to everyone. This country is our home, and we helped build it both physically and morally. The struggle of black people in America, therefore, is the struggle of America itself to, as damali put it, “get behind its own dream.” So that’s a sampling of what the New Black History Course might