He gradually came to realize that, in his internal worldview, women had been nearly as invisible and agentless as black men in the white imagination and that the names of black women and black gay men who meet similar fates as Martin are quickly forgotten. His political awakening was framed by a litany of names, men and boys like Trayvon Martin, whose death “places us in the unenviable position of wishing that our martyrs could have survived to become tokens.” Voting for Barack Obama was his father’s proudest memory, but the author did so unenthusiastically, feeling that the “potency of black political activism is undercut by the unfounded belief that we can find a place within the system and thrive.” Smith uses deeply personal, often haunting imagery to describe his formative years at a historically black college and his struggles with mental illness that left him a few credits shy of a degree. Nation contributing writer Smith, who was raised in a strict military household and surreptitiously listened to hip-hop under the covers at night, writes of the tension between his straight-laced parents and the brash anti-establishment views of his artistic heroes. 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.As black men are cut down by the police and self-appointed vigilantes, an activist wrestles with competing claims-from his family and community, his historically black university, the media, and white America-on his blackness and how it is to be lived. 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. An unflinching account of what it means to be a young black man in America today, and how the existing script for black manhood is being rewritten in one of the most fascinating periods of American history.
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