What It Is: Race, Family, and One Thinking Black Man's Blues
Written by Clifford Thompson
Narrated by Leon Nixon
4/5
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About this audiobook
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.
Editor's Note
Poetic and powerful…
What does it mean to be a Black man in Trump’s America? Writer Clifford Thompson’s personal, heartfelt exploration takes readers across the country and into conversations with Americans of various racial backgrounds who hold starkly different points of view. Inspired by his late mentor, jazz critic Albert Murray, Thompson embraces an “open-ended, improvisational” approach to his interviews, making for a poetic, powerful look at the state of our nation. For fans of James Baldwin and Ta-Nehisi Coates.
Clifford Thompson
Clifford Thompson’s work has appeared in publications including The Best American Essays 2018, Washington Post, Wall Street Journal, Threepenny Review, and Village Voice. He is the recipient of a Whiting Award for nonfiction and teaches at New York University, Sarah Lawrence College, and the Bennington Writing Seminars. He lives in Brooklyn, New York
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Reviews for What It Is
22 ratings2 reviews
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5I was throughly entertained. I think my favorite part was when he said watching someone try to explain why Donald Trump would make a great president looked like a grown man enthusiastically talking about how Santa Claus was real ??
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Clifford Thompson se cuestiona si es compatible ser estadounidense y afrodescendiente, qué implica pertenecer a un grupo minorizado, que fue esclavizado, en un país como Estados Unidos. Para responder esa interrogante entrevista a algunos de los votantes de Trump. Ofrece así un camino para afrontar la división que oprime a grupos enteros, el entendimiento. La necesidad de entender al otro.