How To Be Black by Baratunde Thurston

How To Be Black by Baratunde Thurston is part tongue-in-cheek manual, part autobiography, part treatise on race in America. If you know people from Harvard or listen to Blacking It Up/This Week in Blackness, this book may feel repetitive because it has the same humor & quality of talking to one of your friends or listening to the show so you’ll have moments of deja vu & wonder if you’ve already read this book. If not, this book will helpfully introduce you to a burgeoning trend of comedians as political commentators on Sunday morning tv and throughout society. Baratunde Thurston doesn’t quite get the rhythm right when switching from satire to autobiography to interviews, but I applaud his effort to syncretize the three.