What Doesn't Kill You Makes You Blacker

<p><strong>A Finalist for the NAACP Image Award</strong></p><p><strong>A Finalist for the Hurston/Wright Legacy Award for Nonfiction</strong></p><p><strong>A Finalist for the Thurber Prize for American Humor</strong></p><p><strong>Longlisted for the PEN/Diamonstein-Spielvogel Award for the Art of the Essay</strong></p><p><strong>An NPR Best Book of the Year</strong></p><p><strong>A <em>Washington Independent Review of Books</em> Favorite of the Year</strong></p><p><strong>From the host of podcast Stuck with Damon Young cofounder of VerySmartBrothas.com and one of the most read writers on race and culture at work today a provocative and humorous memoir-in-essays that explores the ever-shifting definitions of what it means to be Black (and male) in America</strong></p><p>For Damon Young existing while Black is an extreme sport. The act of possessing black skin while searching for space to breathe in America<em> </em>is enough to induce a ceaseless state of angst where questions such as How should I react here as a professional black person? and Will this white person's potato salad kill me? are forever relevant.</p><p><em>What Doesn't Kill You Makes You Blacker </em>chronicles Young's efforts to survive while battling and making sense of the various neuroses his country has given him.</p><p>It's a condition that's sometimes stretched to absurd limits: creating the farce where as a teen he wished for a white person to call him a racial slur just so he could fight him and have a great story about it; provoking the angst that made him question if being straight was something he could practice and get better at like a crossover dribble; and generating the surreal experience of watching his Pittsburgh neighborhood getrify from predominantly Black to Portlandia . . . but with Pierogies. </p><p>And at its most devastating it provides him reason to believe that his mother would be alive today if she were white.</p><p>From one of our most respected cultural observers <em>What Doesn't Kill You Makes You Blacker </em>is a hilarious and honest debut that is both a celebration of the idiosyncrasies and distinctions of Blackness and a critique of white supremacy and how we define masculinity.</p>