What Doesn't Kill You Makes You Blacker by Damon Young

The Short Stacks 12: Damon Young//What Doesn’t Kill You Makes You Blacker He drops so many gems throughout the episode, you won’t want to miss it. We had Damon Young on The Short Stacks and he talked all about What Doesn’t Kill You Makes You Blacker and you can hear that conversation by clicking HERE. I don’t know that this book changes your life, but I do think it will make you stop and reflect about how you can live a little better. He is speaking of his own experiences and observations inn this book, and because of his ability to articulate the whys behind so much of his life you leave the reading experience with a lot to digest. These essays are solid but don’t always strike the same thrilling balance between humor, insight, and vulnerability that are present in the above mentioned essays.ĭamon Young is powerful voice in Black culture, as the co-founder of Very Smart Brothas and Senior Editor at The Root, and he is a voice that is unpretentious and relatable. The other essays in What Doesn’t Kill You Makes You Blacker cover a variety of topics from Black anxiety, use of “n-word”, homophobia, and gentrification. You can sense Young’s anxiety around diving so deep, and luck for us he writes these essays anyway, because they are truly impactful. Thus, these essays take on an urgency that isn’t found elsewhere in the book. Weather it be the health care system and his mother, his unconventional love story with his wife, the hopes he holds for his daughter, or his own reckoning with the kind of man he once was in the face of Rape Culture, Young is grappling with his humanity in relationship to those around him and society at large. They all engage with Young and his relationship to women in some way.

There are four essays in this book that really stand out. He shares his anxieties, insecurities, victories, and tragedies with us. We get glimpses of what it means for Young to be alive as a Black man in America in 2019. And instead of telling us all the whats in his life, he is clear that he wants to show us the whys.

Young takes apart his life and reconstructs the most important and formative stories, people, and ideas into essays. All of this can be said as well, for his new book What Doesn’t Kill You Makes You Blacker. He is funny, he is observant, he is smart, he is Pittsburgh, and he is Black. For more information click here.ĭamon Young is known for bringing his authentic voice to his work. The Stacks received What Doesn’t Kill You Makes You Blacker from the publisher.

What Doesn't Kill You Makes You Blacker by Damon Young