Invisible Man, Got the Whole World Watching by Mychal Denzel Smith

Having been on the receiving end of discrimination his entire life, Smith also finds himself also posturing the same attitudes towards women without realizing how much these learned attitudes prevented him from seeing the whole picture.

But until he reaches college, he fails to consider the voices of those who understand those black men the most, those who 'see them most clearly' - black women. As a teenager, he finds solace and hope in the words of Malcolm X, Mos Def, Dave Chappelle, and Ralph Ellison - his black male heroes. But the difficulty for Smith has been learning how to vocalize and express black masculinity when much of the language he has been taught to express himself is also rooted and framed within a racist and sexist framework. As Smith witnesses the deaths of Oscar Grant, Trayvon Martin, Michael Brown, and many more, he begins to ask himself how he has learned to be a black man in America, when so many black boys have not even been allowed to become men at all. When we were too young to know better, we were unknowingly guided into an apathetic posture towards issues of discrimination that were mostly swept under the rug but have recently come back into the public eye with fresh urgency. Having been born the same year as Mychal Denzel Smith - coming of age during the delusional post-Reagan 90s during which nearly everyone tried to teach us that sexism and racism were problems only of the past - I too share Smith's inclination towards borderline obnoxious activism. The questions Smith asks in this book are urgent-for him, for the martyrs and the tokens, and for the Trayvons that could have been and are still waiting. Smith unapologetically upends reigning assumptions about black masculinity, rewriting the script for black manhood so that depression and anxiety aren't considered taboo, and feminism and LGBTQ rights become part of the fight. In Invisible Man, Got the Whole World Watching, Mychal Denzel Smith chronicles his own personal and political education during these tumultuous years, describing his efforts to come into his own in a world that denied his humanity. It means celebrating powerful moments of black self-determination for LeBron James, Dave Chappelle, and Frank Ocean.

It means witnessing the deaths of Oscar Grant, Trayvon Martin, Michael Brown, Akai Gurley, and too many more.

How do you learn to be a black man in America? For young black men today, it means coming of age during the presidency of Barack Obama. New York Times Book Review Editor's Choice

Invisible Man, Got the Whole World Watching by Mychal Denzel Smith