They never said it in those words either, of course, because they didn’t know who Barack Obama was.

My parents wanted me to become Barack Obama. He wanted me to be an upstanding citizen with unimpeachable credentials who could gain everyone’s respect so they might see me as more than “just another black man” and come to see me as a man. It was the key to the future my father envisioned for me. Academic excellence was the biggest part of being “twice as good” and therefore a college education was non-negotiable. ” I wasn’t supposed to ever give anyone the opportunity to think of me as less than. My mother corrected my English whenever I dropped my g’s or started a sentence with “me and. I wasn’t allowed to sag my pants, or say the “n-word,” or listen to rap music that had explicit lyrics.

It was never said in those exact words, but the idea was planted early on that my life would be one where I would defy all of the stereotypes associated with being a black man. My parents sent me to college to become a credit to my race. 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. 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.

Heavy kiese laymon sparknotes