What Doesn’t Kill You Makes You Blacker audiobook

I've been a big fan of Damon Young since way before Very Smart Brothas got rolled into The Root, so I was bonkers excited for this book. And I loved it, of course. I love his voice, I love the particular way he writes, full of meandering and often hilarious digressions, absurdist but totally on-point analogies, and long passages that start funny and shift slightly and slightly until before you know it he's holding forth with righteous anger. The book is full of lines like "Pittsburgh, a city so historically, hilariously, and hopelessly white that Rick James once tried to snort it" and "high school classrooms are basically internet comment threads with acne" and "when drunk, I usually eat how rabbits fuck—angry, sweaty, and looking over my shoulder for falcons" and "to me, fucklessness is the pinnacle of manliness." In these essays he meditates on pick-up basketball, his terrible college poetry, down-ass white boys, his obsession with Kool-Aid, his parents' bouts with debt and housing insecurity, and the way society misperceives black children as less childlike and black women as stronger, thereby never allowing either group to be their authentic selves. He covers his substitute teaching days, why it took him until he was almost thirty to get a drivers license, why he served brunch at his wedding, and how he executed the world's slowest, most pathetic porn-video heist. He delves into his relationships with his parents, his girlfriends and later his wife, his (mostly black) social circle and his (mostly white) basketball peers. He wrings out his neuroses and anxieties, juxtaposing them with his incisive political and social analysis.I love his soliloquy on PTBD (post-traumatic brokeness disorder), his treatise on the tension between black men and homosexuality, and his firsthand struggles with the gentrification of his Pittsburgh neighborhood as seen through his decades going to different barber shops. The essay on racial relations vis-á-vis his (mostly white) pickup basketball team was gutting. The chapter on how to teach his daughter to grow up strong and proud and willing to try to be anything in a world that is horrifically harsh to black women was incredible. There were a few missteps. I don't think he really fully reckoned with rape culture and the entire universe of difference between men and women's experiences under the patriarchy—this is relevant because there's an entire essay on the time he wrote a pretty tone-deaf article about how women should work harder to not get raped. And I don't think he really faced the dynamic between his parents and what that meant for them both, which would involve a lot of summarizing to explain here but suffice it to say he gives his dad (whom he loves so, so much) pass after pass after pass, which is fine, but he has a whole chapter where he almost makes it to talking about what it meant that Dad was unemployed for most of his life while Mom (whom he also loves so, so, so much) supported the whole family. But also: who the fuck am I to judge Damon Young? This is his life, and these are his essays, and maybe he'll get to different places in subsequent books. For now, this is a fantastic collection, brave and brazen and righteous and important..

This memoir in essays by the blogger known for Very Smart Brothas was very smart, very funny, keen-sighted, outraged, yet often self-deprecating and revealing on blackness at every level and scale,--family life, being broke, being a black man hoping to be loved by black women, being a black man trying to get ahead. The pressure of performing blackness and black male-ness and searching for his own authenticity within that pressure to perform, and how to think of and deal with society's all pervasive whiteness. Damon Young, like all good memoirists, finds nothing too personal, too small, too large, too embarrassing, too condemning, to turn under his often sardonic eye. He sees phenomena from a number of different perspectives a the same time, like hating the gentrification of his old East Liberty neighborhood of Pittsburg while at the same time really liking the burgers at some high price cafe. The multiple layers of questions and performances and genuine desires and questioned desires that make black life so stressful, and especially his life so. Like all good memoirists, he doesn't spare himself--andmany of the essays do turn upon the things he doesn't like about himself, issues and behavior that trouble him. His sense of humor allows him to tread on those coals on the page, and talk about things that have seared him very badly in life. There was a lot about basketball--to Young it was (and is) intrinsic to having a place in the world-- from a young age, a place in rough neighborhoods and a ticket into safer ones, a mooring in the frightening transition into sexual possibility, a negotiating place for himself within blackness and with whiteness. It is a connection with his father and hope for the future. It is about masculinity, and the performance of masculinity. He sees men in terms of their game. His relationship to romance was particularly paradoxical--his longing to be loved by black women but also and sometimes more importantly, his desire for the status that girls can give him--that other boys SEE him as attractive to women, a theme that he readily acknowledges. The details of black culture were terrific--like his relationships to black barbershops in "East Liberty Kutz"--one of the best essay. He tells us of the significance of a really sharp haircut that has me seeing black men more clearly, noticing the hairline, aware of the upkeep. And then there's the specifics of his own barbershop-- a shop he wants to support in the gentrification of his old neighborhood, but he begins to tire of the lousy haircuts and his shame that he starts seeing a better barber at a gentrified shop nearby. Each essay casts its net wide--to pick up history, personal anecdote, political insight, and to bear down on the way they impact each other, that you can't explore any aspect of black life without understanding the meld. and I liked the messiness of his trajectory, the often clashing opinions he has of himself and the world, his take is almost always layered and sometimes paradoxical--sincerely calling out his own dishonesties. And the book is so often funny that in the times when he is singularly NOT funny, it snatches you up--hey, this is dead serious now. Here's just the opener, an essay called "Living While Black Is An Extreme Sport.", talking about the Polar Bear Plunge in Pittsburgh: "Perhaps, while reading that paragraph, an image of a Polar Bear Plunger plopped into your head. Without knowing anything about you, I know--I am certain--that the bare-chested, shivering and possibly inebriated person you envisioned happened to be white. And not just because whiteness is such the American default that it has even colonized our imaginations, but because willing exposing ourself to frostbite, hypothermia, and the trillion year half life Mon Valley isotopes floating downstream is about as "that's some white-peole shit" as "that some white peole shit" gets. Only someone so comfortably ensconced in privilege that they need to find ways to fabricate closeness to death to feel alive would leave their bed and blankets and house end clothes and city and the tens of thousands of years of civilization devoted to finding more efficient ways to protect us from the elements in the dead of winter to belly flop into a billion gallons of toxic ice. It's so white that if you happen to be a nonwhite member of the Polar Bear Club--and it doesn't matter of you're Barack Obama, Michello Obama, Chaka Khan or Shaka Zulu--you become , from the time you climb back out of the water, white by osmosis."Having to go to such extreme lengths to feel a rush is an alien concept for me, since living while black has provided me with enough thrills to make Wes Craven scream. Whenever I am followed by a police officer while driving, for instance, the theme song from Mission Impossible plays on a loop in my head, and the mental checklist I run through reminds me of Ethan Hunt attempting defuse a nuclear warhead."Serious and funny and furious, anxious and embarrassing and fond--revealing on blackness and whiteness and most of all, on Damon Young. A terrific book.

"So much of the national dialogue about race deals with either terrible trauma or black excellence," Young said. "I was more interested in the space in between, because that’s where I exist." Damon Young, in The New York Times, March 2019. I love this, in all the ways that I love when writers examine those in-between spaces of theme, language, character, place. Reading this gave me the space to enter into a conversation with Damon Young while reading his raw, irreverent and fun-as-hell-to-read collection of personal essays. The opening essay, Nigger Fight Story and a mid-collection piece, Three Niggas are two of the standouts to me - revealing Young's very complicated relationship to those very complicated n-words and the Black community's rightful claim over their use, intent and impact, as well as the lament to Pittsburgh's gentrification, East Liberty Kutz and his beautiful ode to his darling parents, Living While Black Killed My Mom.I was far less enamored of Banging Over Bacon which was TMI of ridiculous proportions. As witty and self-effacing as Young tried to be over the story of how he and his wife ended up together, it felt tawdry and sad. None of us is above judgment. But this wasn't a story that needed to be shared. Some of the essays that reveal past relationships with women and alcohol become repetitive in context and content, more like a sandwich that's all puffy bread and not enough meat. The acerbic wit feels forced. But when Young weaves his coming of age in Pittsburgh — and how beautifully he crafts a character out of this landscape — into the tapestry of being Black in the early 21st century, his words refresh, reveal, and rivet.

This memoir was not designed for a reader like me. There were so many cultural and basketball references I did not get or understand. And, at the same time, especially toward the end, the author's dissertations on racism and white supremacy should be required reading for everyone.

I really enjoyed this one. Damon has been a fav since the early blogging days of Very Smart Brothas (VSB), and I couldn’t wait for him to release a book. I got it and saw him in SF on his tour in 2018, but took my sweet time cracking it open. Not sure why, but that could be because essays aren’t my thing.Well, they are now. Damon’s wit jumps off the page, and the topics he covers are still very relevant and interesting. The intro and first few essays did not move me and I worried I’d have to DNF this one, but his hilarious take on Love Jones and spoken word, along with how his personal re-brand from athlete to poet in the early 00s forced him to respect female autonomy, was entertaining and very well done. “Bomb-Ass Poetry” reeled me in and the rest of the book kept me glued to the page. I especially enjoyed how he examined his relationship with his parents, and his acceptance of how much his father may have contributed to his mother’s demise no matter how much his father loved her and their children (“I will not have to wait for his deathbed confession to finally hear that he loves me. I’ve heard it more times than I can count, and I’ve known it since I’ve known what love is.”). The vulnerability really moved me in this chapter (“Living While Black Killed My Mom”) and in his “How to Make the Internet Hate You in 15 Simple Steps” essay, in which he apologizes for the very dumb mistake early in his career of putting the onus of rape on women making better decisions in an a VSB post (I am so happy I missed this blunder because I can’t say I’d still be a fan of his writing had I read this in real time). I also really loved his essay on gentrification and the barbershop (“East Liberty Kutz”) which opened my eyes to the similarities between Pittsburgh and my hometown of Oakland (and likely every other blue collar city with a medium sized Black population).A lot of the book reminded me of blogging, which can get old pretty quickly because the cadence/rhythm is very different from long form writing (the most popular blogs in the 2000s and early 2010s were short for a reason in my opinion), but it didn’t bother me as much in this collection. A strong 3.75 stars for the humor and vulnerability in this one.

This is, quite simply, one of the best books I've ever read -- not only because it so funny, so well crafted and so openly honest, but because it opened up a parallel universe for me, into the everyday experience of blackness in America that, in this case, is literally right next door to me.Damon Young is a writer who expresses his wisdom at the site Verysmartbrothas.com in Pittsburgh. He also grew up in East Liberty, the Pittsburgh neighborhood where my church is located, where I shop, and which is one neighborhood away from the one I live in.In this brilliant combination of memoir and commentary, Young takes us through his upbringing in a lower-income family, his experiences as a high school basketball star and then struggling college player, through his relationships with women, the world of black barbershops and haircuts, the experience of trying to make enough money to live a middle-class life, and the constant racism that permeates and informs his world.On top of which, and infusing every word, are his hard-won wisdom and his insights.When I say parallel universe, I mean that quite literally. Not only is this book full of Pittsburgh places and businesses and neighborhoods and streets that I know, but they exist in superposition to my own life. I walk and drive these streets, visit many of these businesses, can visualize one site after another, and yet I am made painfully aware by Young of how he lives in a separate world from me, an older white privileged male who faces none of the historic and contemporary obstacles that he encounters every day.For whites seeking to understand racial divisions and tension and see a hope for the future, some of the books by black authors may seem intimidating or aggressively sharp-edged. Damon Young takes you through that crucible without pulling any punches, but also, because of his willingness to write about his anxieties and mistakes and self-doubts, he allows you to join the journey, knowing that you will never have to experience what he does, and yet, in the end, grateful to have been along for the trip.Just. Flat. Out. Brilliant.

Dear Damon Young, Thank you for writing this book. Early on you said you wanted to write something that you would’ve wanted to read. I hope this lived up to your expectations because it far exceeded mine. I listened to you on a panel at Los Angeles Time Festival of Books and thought it was easily one of the top three panels/discussions I’ve ever heard at that event. The book was excellently crafted with exceptional diction and topic arrangement. I will and have recommended this to many people and wanted to personally thank you again for sharing your thoughts and experiences for all to partake in and hopefully learn from.

On a scale from 1 to Queen Latifah’s cover of “I Put a Spell On You”, how cool did I feel reading a galley of this memoir on the subway? Pretty damn cool. This book was such an absolute pleasure to stumble upon. I wasn’t familiar with VerySmartBrothas.com but Young’s writing in this collection of essays is so incisive, so honest, so full of love, and so goddamn hilarious that I know I’ve been missing out. The fact that any discourse about race in this country so often has to be cloaked in humor for people to listen is of course a disheartening one, but I was too busy cackling to mind. In particular, Young does such a beautiful job of explaining his relationship to the n-word, how it can be a blunt instrument coming from the mouth of a stranger but a measure of the utmost comfort, playfulness, and security when spoken by a friend. I want to throw a copy of this at every person who ever complained about the unfairness of not being able to use that word, because if you don’t get it after reading this book, you ain’t never gonna get it. (Note: If I had been a reader of VSB, I might have been turned off by Young’s “Rape Responsibility” piece and not given him or the book a chance, so maybe I should be grateful that we weren’t previously introduced because the loss would have been entirely mine. In an age of hollow apologies, Young’s unsparing account of that incident comes across as that of someone mature enough to examine, recognize, and indeed take responsibility for an extremely misguided take, and he earned my enduring respect as a result.)

Damon Young provides the reader a look at the peculiarities of the Blackness from a Black male perspective with a mix of honesty, hubris and humor. Certainly, these essays will resonate with those in the tribe. But, the prose is inviting enough to pull in any reader interested in the lives lived from the edge. Damon names the introduction, Living While Black Is An Extreme Sport and writes,“This hypercognizance of both my blackness and what the possession of blackness in America is supposed to mean has created a n#**a neurosis—a state of being where Did that happen because I’m black? and If this is happening because I’m Black, how am I supposed to react as a Professional Black Person? are never not pertinent questions.” It is this neurosis that informs this book of memoir through essays. His voice is valuable and valorous, for Living While Black can indeed be a battle as Damon declares with examples galore from his own life. The one thing that rankled me, is the use and vigorous defense of the N word. I’ve heard all the excuses, explanations, etc. for the continued use of it and I’m not buying any of it. However, that’s my personal issue and doesn’t keep me from recommending this book. Read, laugh, learn and reflect.

I enjoyed this far more than I expected (mostly because I had NO idea who this author was before hearing him on an episode of the Death, Sex and Money podcast with Kiese Laymon, which was recommended to me by a friend (thanks, Camille!!)). So I went into it sort of blind, but this was a fantastic reading experience for me.A laugh-out-loud-funny memoir that displays an immense (and sometimes shocking) level of honesty, accountability, wit and keen observations about blackness and the world, Damon Young nailed this essay collection. It is entertaining, and thought-provoking, and just so damn hilarious. However, if you don't typically enjoy culturally specific humour (of the blackity-black variety), meandering stories that branch off into 10 mini-stories before getting to the ultimate point, and gratuitous use of the n-word, this one may not be your cup of tea. But it was definitely mine and I had such a good-ass, black-ass time reading this book. I loved What Doesn't Kill You Makes You Blacker and I would read more from Damon Young in a heartbeat. Highly recommend.

Until we are able to download someone else’s consciousness into our brain in order to fully understand how the world looks from their perspective, I will continue to read memoirs from people with very different life experiences from my own. These essays are smart and insightful and sometimes funny. They opened up my brain in new ways to what it’s like to be a black American. I was bothered by the overabundance of the N-word and the F-word, but Young wasn’t writing to please people bothered by those words. His is an authentic, unapologetic voice, and I appreciated that. In fact, I listened to Young narrate the audiobook, so I literally heard his voice.At times I felt he showed incredible self awareness and courage. At other times I was just annoyed at how juvenile he was (like when he told a story at great length about the time he threatened another man over something silly just to prove his own toxic masculinity). But I forgave him when he later said he doesn’t have time for that sort of thing now. By the end of the book, I felt like he'd grown up and I wanted to sit down and drink Honey Jack with him.Every once in a while, he meanders in these essays a bit too much for my taste, and sometimes he wrings the goodness out of a joke for a little too long. But these are quibbles.The entire book is worthwhile. The last three essays are amazing. Sections about playing basketball with a Trump supporter and raising his daughter are particularly moving and powerful. Well worth the read.

from https://www.barnesandnoble.com/blog/5... Damon Young is the cofounder and editor-in-chief of VerySmartBrothas, a senior editor at The Root, and a writer of great wit and acumen who tells the story of growing up black and male in Pittsburgh with incredible verve. He wrote this book, he explains, “to examine and discover the whys of my life instead of continuing to allow the whats to dominate and fog my memories.” Why did he wait until age 26 to earn a driver’s license? Why did his mother die young? Why did he enjoy Kool-Aid into adulthood? How can he reconcile the fact that he’s troubled by his neighborhood’s gentrification when he also enjoys the upscale amenities this brings? Young tells stories from his life in his trademark kinetic, discursive, joke-cracking style. These essays will amuse and trouble. “Thursday-Night Hoops,” about a pickup basketball league Young plays in with mostly white teammates, should be required reading to help understand the complexities and contradictions of black and white people coexisting in America today.