America Made Me a Black Man

April 1, 2022

Shaped by codes of conduct that helped him survive tough living conditions and civil war in Somalia, a self-confident Farah felt he would thrive when he arrived in America. Instead, he was shocked by the racism and police brutality he encountered. As an African refugee and a Black man in America, he offers a unique insider-outsider perspective on these issues. With a 30,000-copy first printing; originally scheduled for September 2021.

Copyright 2022 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

June 20, 2022
An African immigrant reflects on American racism in this vitriolic memoir. Poet and essayist Farah fled from war-torn Somalia to Boston with his family at age 15 in the early 1990s, giddy with “love for America.” That gratitude soured because of microaggressions by a standoffish white college roommate and police macroaggressions, including an unjust speeding ticket and a wrongful accusation of creating a disturbance. Worst of all was what he perceived as workplace racial bias that led to his firing. Farah braids in reminiscences of Somalia’s violence—“the young man... was stoned to death before my very eyes”—painting it as less toxic than American bigotry, whose “legacy of poisoned black blood and screams of horror leaves its mark upon the crime-ridden conscience of white Americans” and will “carry them off either to destitution or to the madhouse.” Farah’s feverish prose can sound inflated in its denunciations of “racist ghouls” who “surround me, prowl around inside me,” and his narrative, which incorporates composite characters, compressed timelines, altered circumstances, and invented dialogue, doesn’t always ring true in its allegations of racism (“She has been raised by white monkeys,” he writes of a Black lawyer who advised him that his employment-discrimination claim was weak). The result is less a realistic account of racial divisions than a vivid portrait of the paranoia they inspire.

August 1, 2022
Somalian refugee and writer Farah recounts a long record of dehumanization and racism in his adoptive country. "I was living in the belly of America; it was she who made me a black man, relegated me to her black tribe," writes Farah, who arrived in the U.S. after fleeing the civil war in his homeland. He came without a birth certificate and no certain knowledge of his birthday, but, as he writes, he possessed a precisely drawn family history in his mind. His father encouraged him to become a doctor, but his high school guidance counselor had other ideas. Though smart and academically gifted, Farah was steered to manual labor, while his brother was told to learn to drive a truck, and his sister was told to be a mother. Instead, the author went to college, then took a dead-end clerical job, going to the same tiny cubicle day after day for more than 10 years even as vastly less qualified White colleagues were promoted over him. When he expressed hope for a better future, a Black co-worker told him, "You and that hope of yours....The hope you're talking about is in the hands of white people." The hands of White people were always reaching for Farah, occasionally to help, more often to threaten, as his several run-ins with the police attest. A Black police officer quietly offered advice when his younger brother got into trouble with the law: They should send the youth back to his homeland. "US democracy was more threatening to black skin than Somalia," writes the author. Finally he snapped, calling a malicious supervisor racist and demanding that he be treated with dignity, which earned him suspension and then termination. There's a modestly happy conclusion to that story, but suffice it to say that the legal settlement he earned didn't buy him the love of America. An eye-opening, upsetting catalog of indignities that no one should have to suffer in a supposedly free country.

COPYRIGHT(2022) Kirkus Reviews, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.