And he was called an African witch doctor. He pulled his bootstraps all the way up from his humble beginnings to the presidency. This is the way Smith sees Obama’s situation: “He did everything. Remember how Obama’s presidency was supposed to usher in a post-racial era? Well, that hope was pretty much shattered the day of his first inauguration. It is to the credit of both of these publications that they recognized these young men’s talents, their ability to write about difficult topics during the Obama years. Both men are barely thirty, both attended Historically Black Universities (and neither finished their degrees), both entered the field of journalism and had the fortune of seeing their work published in major outlets ( The Atlantic, for Coates, and The Nation, for Smith). Mychal Denzel Smith’s Invisible Man, Got the Whole World Watching: A Young Black Man’s Education shares a number of similarities with Coates’ work but it also moves in other important directions. Some of Coates’s readers must certainly have had their eyes opened, begun to look beyond the surface of racism in the United States. I take that as an encouraging sign, in spite of the ugly Republican racist campaign for the Presidency we are currently undergoing. Coates’s brilliant examination of race in the United States has remained near the top of the best-seller lists for the better part of a year. A year ago, Ta-Nehisi Coates published Between the World and Me, the writer’s explanation (among other things) of why young black men are so fearful of life in the United States. As racism in the United States has gotten worse, young black intellectuals are unafraid to express their outrage at America’s original sin. The questions Smith asks in this book are urgent - for him, for the martyrs and the tokens, and for the Trayvons that could have been and are still waiting.Perhaps this is cause for optimism. Smith unapologetically upends reigning assumptions about black masculinity, rewriting the script for black manhood so that depression and anxiety aren't considered taboo, and feminism and LGBTQ rights become part of the fight. In Invisible Man, Got the Whole World Watching, Mychal Denzel Smith chronicles his own personal and political education during these tumultuous years, describing his efforts to come into his own in a world that denied his humanity. It means celebrating powerful moments of black self-determination for LeBron James, Dave Chappelle, and Frank Ocean. It means witnessing the deaths of Oscar Grant, Trayvon Martin, Michael Brown, Akai Gurley, and too many more.
How do you learn to be a black man in America? For young black men today, it means coming of age during the presidency of Barack Obama. New York Times Book Review Editor's Choice.
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