Young’s charm and wit make these essays a pleasure to read his candid approach makes them memorable. Young uses pop culture references and personal stories to look at a life molded by structural racism, the joy of having a family that holds together in a crisis, and the thrill of succeeding against difficult odds. He wants, he realized, not to be just a “decent” man, but a man “worthy” of friendship with the women in his life. “triflin’-ass” piece dismissing a rape victim’s critique of rape culture. In another, he recalls sneakily renting pornography as a teenager, feeling he was being watched by “my recently deceased aunt Toni, the first Aunt Viv from The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air, Maya Angelou, and the ghost of that guy Morgan Freeman played in Glory.” He critiques toxic masculinity and admits to a major error in judgment: writing a One of the funniest essays contains excerpts of his college-era poetry, often plagiarized from rap lyrics. For example, he writes with honesty and humor about his youthful worry that, if no white person called him the N word, his authenticity as a black man was in question. These darkly hilarious and forthcoming essays from Young, cofounder of social commentary blog Very Smart Brothas, center around the “perpetual surreality” of the African-American experience. Damon Young is famous as a blogger, co-founder of the website Very Smart Brothas, and in What Doesn’t Kill You Makes You Blacker has done something deceptively difficult: pulled together a collection of essays all of which stand perfectly well on their own but also form a satisfying and coherent memoir.
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