How To Be Black by Baratunde R. Thurston
My rating: 3 of 5 stars
Baratunde Thurston seems like a pretty cool guy. He has a fairly interesting story about how (basically
through his mother's determination) he grew up in "inner city*" Washington, DC, attended the Sidwell
Friend's school and Harvard, and then became a dominant internet personality. (He made his name on
the internet writing for the Onion, and Jack and Jill Politics and his twitter coverage of the 2012 republican national convention was hilarious.) I would love to get the chance to hang out
with him and talk about race and class in modern American society. I was hoping that this book would be like
a distillation of that experience in easily portable book form.
Unfortunately, it's not.
The problem I had with this book is that it's just not enough. It's not funny enough, it's not provocative
enough, it's not prescriptive enough. I mean, the book is called "How to be Black." But the answer to the
question: "How to be black?" is "Just be yourself (assuming you're black)."
The greatest sin is the first, of course. The Onion has produced some of the most incisive humor of the last
decade. I was expecting more from this book, but unfortunately, far too often the humor boils down to: list 3
real but outrageous things followed by one wildly outlandish thing.
The best part of the book is the black panel of experts, but there's no dialogue presented, just paragraph
responses to the author's questions.**
Occasionally the book shines. There are maybe 3 very funny pages.*** There's a really interesting interplay
between the author Christain Lander about how to the extent that there's a white culture, it's a product of
privilege and wealth and what this means for other cultures.**** But again, it's just not enough.
* Questions I would have liked answered in this book: What are white people supposed to call the crack-blighted neighborhoods where so many black people live.
** I did appreciate that Christian Lander of Stuff White People Like was included on the black panel, but
again, it would have been much more effective to have Baratunde Thurston and Christian Lander have a
discussion on some issue, and explore it in depth rather than (i'm guessing) cutting and pasting an email
response into the book.
*** The office party section from the chapter: How to be a Black Employee is my favorite.
**** Persistent readers of my reviews will notice a theme here.
View all my reviews
