What It Is
Race, Family, and One Thinking Black Man's Blues
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3.7 • 3 Ratings
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- $2.99
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- $2.99
Publisher Description
An African-American writer's concise, heartfelt take on the state of his nation, exploring the war between the values he has always held and the reality with which he is confronted in twenty-first-century America.
In the tradition of James Baldwin's The Fire Next Time and Ta-Nehisi Coates's Between the World and Me comes Clifford Thompson's What It Is. Thompson was raised to believe in treating every person of every color as an individual, and he decided as a young man that America, despite its history of racial oppression, was his home as much as anyone else's. As a middle-aged, happily married father of biracial children, Thompson finds himself questioning his most deeply held convictions when the race-baiting Donald Trump ascends to the presidency—elected by whites, whom Thompson had refused to judge as a group, and who make up the majority in this country Thompson had called his own.
In the grip of contradictory emotions, Thompson turns for guidance to the wisdom of writers he admires while knowing that the answers to his questions about America ultimately lie in America itself. Through interviews with a small but varied group of Americans he hears sharply divergent opinions about what is happening in the country while trying to find his own answers—conclusions based not on conventional wisdom or on what he would like to believe, but on what he sees.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In this thoughtful memoir, Thompson (Love for Sale and Other Essays), a professor at New York University and Sarah Lawrence College, considers his life in a racially and culturally divided America. He recalls his Christian childhood in a nurturing 1970s Washington, D.C., community one that was imperfect but was committed to treating others with openness and respect. Throughout life, he turned to such authors as James Baldwin, Stanley Crouch, and especially Albert Murray, whose work emphasized "the integral place of blacks in America, a legacy of grit, resourcefulness, accomplishment, and improvisation... and jazz." Once in college, he "felt like the only black person I knew who was not reluctant... to be in the predominantly white settings." He married the blond daughter of a Manhattan book editor, fathered biracial children, and encountered racism (he admits, however, to being "luckier than many black people"). Throughout, he opines on President Trump's inept leadership (the election was "an unqualified disaster") and the loyalty of Trump's supporters (a retiree he interviewed called Trump "a man who had the backbone to stand up for what he thought, and would say so"). Ever the optimist, the author concludes: "Just remember they're not all the same, just like we're not all the same." In prose that is subtle and graceful, Thompson's narrative casts a refreshing light on race in America.
