Born Writer

What Doesn’t Kill You Makes You Blacker by Damon Young.  Harper Collins.  320 pp.  $15.99

Damon Young is famous as a blogger, co-founder of the website Very Smart Brothas, and in What Doesn’t Kill You Makes You Blacker has done something deceptively difficult: pulled together a collection of essays all of which stand perfectly well on their own but also form a satisfying and coherent memoir.  He addresses issues of racism that go far beyond him.  But he’s the kind of writer—and this is rare—who is able to delve into issues of systemic racism by writing primarily about himself.

Two things separate me and author Damon Young.  I’m white and he’s Black.  I’m 72 and he’s 42; two-thirds of the cultural references in this book flew right over my head.  But there is one thing that bonds us.  We both grew up in, and love, the city of Pittsburgh.

I have lived in North Carolina, usually Durham, for most of my life, but am still most comfortable when I’m driving the streets of Pittsburgh.  Young grew up in East Liberty, where I used to hang out when I was young; then lived in Penn Hills. where my sister lived at the end of her life; Shadyside, where my sister had raised her family; Point Breeze, where I grew up; and the Northside, where I go to ballgames whenever I visit.  Young is a true lover of the city, and this book is packed with Pittsburgh detail, a lot of which I didn’t know, but all to the point of what he is saying.

From the start of the book Young makes a distinction between the way a white man says the n-word (with an “er” at the end) and a Black man (with an “a”).  He lets us know that the use of the word in those different contexts is completely different, and that the way black men use it is incomprehensible to whites.[1]  But in order to get the point across, he tells of a young white man who had gone completely Black, got his hair cut in a black barbershop, played basketball with Black guys and held his own, dated Black women.  He was accepted to the point where a bunch of them invited him over to watch an NBA game, and to stay for the drinking and conversation that happened afterwards.  But when the guy was telling a story of his own and used that word (even with the right letter at the end) the conversation came to a stop.  Nobody got violent.  But he was never asked back.

Young goes on to say that he respects African Americans, like Oprah Winfrey, who will not allow that word to be used in their presence, by anyone.  And yet the intimacy of African Americans using it among themselves (he has fond memories of hearing his parents use it with each other when he was young, and hoped he would find a wife with whom he could do that.  Spoiler alert: he did), and the verbal inventiveness of the way they use it, is something to behold.  Young gives a long list of ways he has used the word just in the past couple of days.  It’s side splitting.

This is a serious book about race.  It’s also hilariously funny.  It’s a lot easier to accept that I’m racist if I’m falling out of my chair laughing at the same time.

I would also say that the verbal inventiveness of two Black men talking to each other intimately, as reported by Young, is way beyond anything I hear among white men, and Young’s own verbal inventiveness is spectacular.  He began life as a basketball player who crashed and burned at Canisius (at first because of the conditioning, later because of nagging injuries), so he went on to become a bomb ass poet (whatever that is, but I think I got the point), and gradually, over time, while working a number of difficult jobs (he was a substitute teacher in Wilkinsburg, which cannot have been easy, but which he seemed to do very well), developed his writing skills and expanded his Internet presence.  There’s no doubt that this man was meant to be a writer.  He’s found his true vocation.

Along the way are a number of moving portraits, of his best friend Brian, who attended East Liberty Presbyterian Church, just a couple of blocks from the church my family attended; of his father, who was one of the funniest, smartest, and most entertaining people Young knew, but who often had trouble finding steady work, just because he was Black; his mother, who had a special relationship with her son and who Young argues died young because she was Black: if she had been a white woman she would have received better medical care (I found what he said convincing).  Young also has a number of stories about his romantic and sexual life, not all of which show him in a good light; he’s completely honest about his sexual misadventures and failings.  And he has a beautiful tribute to the woman he eventually married and another one to the daughter they had together, without being schmaltzy.

Speaking as a clueless white person (which is how Young would see me), I feel that racism is basically ignorance, that I have been trying to dispel that ignorance for over fifty years, ever since African Americans took over an administrative building at my university and stated their demands; that I am not terribly far along in that project, and that I will never finish it.  But I learn more from hearing stories of a person’s life than I do from being lectured on how I should behave, or not behave.  In other words, I found this an instructive book precisely because it was Young telling stories of his life.

The day when he had found a job in admissions at Carnegie Mellon, for instance, by pulling strings exactly the way white people often do, and was about to double his salary, from being a substitute teacher to working for a prestigious university (he had already told us all his dreams of power lunches in Oakland with his colleagues), and then the man hiring him asked one question which would have been no problem for most white guys but which brought the whole thing crashing down: that story was heartbreaking.  It wasn’t his fault.  It was the result of race, and poverty.

There was only one place in the book where I really disagreed with him.  In addressing the election of our current President, he tells a story of Thursday night basketball games that he plays at Central Catholic with men of varying ages.  The point guard that he likes to play with is highly skilled, a great passer, but also an overweight white guy who is past his prime, a lawyer and a conservative.  Young knew him to be a Trump supporter.  He thought about not going  the Thursday night after the election, but loved basketball so much he went, and saw this guy’s smugness, and that of other white guys on the court.[2]  He saw the election results as yet another victory for whiteness.

I understand that.  In some ways I thought the same thing.  But I’m white, and it wasn’t a victory for me, or for most people I know.  It was one of the worst moments of my life.  Young is a bigger man than I am in one way.  I wouldn’t have played basketball with that guy that night.  I’m not sure I would ever have gone back.

[1] I’m reminded of the time I was working at Urban Ministries in downtown Durham, presiding over the waiting room for the food pantry and clothing closet, and a middle-aged African American said to some younger guys, “Hey, don’t be using that word in front of these white people.”  They nodded as if to say, Okay, man, get off our case.  And he said, “No.  For real.”

[2] I was surprised that a lot of men associated with Central Catholic would have supported Trump.  My three nephews went to Central.  And the city of Pittsburgh voted overwhelmingly for Hillary.