Q&A: Author Boyah J. Farah reflects on being Black in America

When Boyah J. Farah arrived in the United States as a teenager, he expected the country to be paradise. And for a while it was – when he rode his bike down the quiet streets of his Boston-suburb, past smiling neighbors with their perfectly manicured lawns. "I really thought that God favored America," he said.

But try as he might to hold on to that image, the reality of American racism eventually began to surface cracks in Farah's fantasy. Slowly but surely, he began to understand that as a Black American, his life wouldn't play out like the Hollywood movies he had grown up with. He would be forced into a different sort of role.

In his new memoir, Farah tells the story of what American blackness has meant to him, from his childhood in Somalia to his adolescence and early adulthood in the Northeast, to the moment as an adult that he decided to return to Somalia after decades spent