Adam Mansbach Angry Black White Boy or, the miscegenation of Macon Detornay
Adam Mansbach’s second book is an amazing take on racial issues in the US viewed through the lens of hip hop culture and spliced with a good dose of comedy and dark humour. ‘Angry Black White Boy’ is the story of Macon Detornay: a white boy raised in Massachusetts, fed on hip hop culture and who hates the white man. After moving to New York to start his first year at Columbia University, Macon soon finds himself robbing white people from his taxi, stealing their wallets and soon enough unwittingly becoming the center figure in a mission to get America to confront its racial past. You see, after a few robberies everyone thinks the culprit is a black man and when it turns out to be Macon, a white boy with a tattoo of the LA riots date on his arm, well the stage is suddenly set for him to become a celebrity. Using his new found fame to force America to deal with its past, Macon sets up the Race Traitor Project and asks for a day of apology. But it all goes a bit wrong and Macon finds himself hiding in the Deep South.
Alongside this extreme and realistic story Adam Mansbach also weaves the historical tale of the last integrated Major League baseball game of 1889, casting the last black baseball player, Moses "Fleet" Walker, and his white counterpart, Cap Anson, as the great grand fathers of Macon and his new roommate, Andre.
‘Angry Black White Boy’ is a great book. Beautifully told, the story grips you from the start and its setting ensures you have to know what happens next. The book’s main subject is not an easy one yet the author manages to delve into it head first and show both sides of the argument through the highly caustic tale of a white home boy who’s spent the best part of his life wondering what it’s like to be black, to be the minority, to be on the receiving end. And while the book’s subject may be a serious one, the tone always manages to keep a comic angle, keeping the reader engaged and laughing at situations that are not so comically rooted. By soaking the story in and recounting it (partly) through hip hop culture, Adam Mansbach also manages to make the issues he deals with even more relevant to this generation, and show the reader that we’ve all somehow, somewhere felt like Macon or his black roommate Andre. The addition of the baseball game also serves to anchor Macon’s tale in history and show that while this may be a slightly surreal account of America confronting its racial past, it should not be dismissed as just that. After all in a day and age where the cult of the celebrity status has never been stronger and it’s never been easier to become an overnight celebrity, is it really impossible for someone to become the white face of America’s repressed black past?
It doesn’t matter that the book is set in America, hip hop culture is a worldwide affair these days, and America is not the only country with a racial past it’d rather forget. This book works because it deals with issues that anyone in today’s hip hop generation can relate to and identify with, from the Bronx to Paris via Cuba. As the press release notes, this book really is a race novel reworked for the hip hop generation. It’s frank, to the point and honest… and on top of that it’s one hell of a funny read, one you’ll find yourself going back to over and over.
- Kper
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