My Mother. Barack Obama. Donald Trump. and the Last Stand of the Angry White Man.

June 15, 2018
Emotionally raw essays focus on racism, sexism, and manhood.In a collection of previously published essays, journalist, activist, blogger, and podcast host Powell (The Education of Kevin Powell: A Boy's Journey into Manhood, 2016, etc.) writes with urgency and outrage about his identity as a black American. "To be Black in America is to live a sort of death every single day of your life," he writes. "It makes for a stressful, paranoid, and schizophrenic existence: Am I an American, or am I not?" The author grew up in the slums of Jersey City, raised by a single mother who struggled to support them on meager wages and government assistance. When he was 8, his father, whom he had seen only a few times, refused to help financially, claiming that Kevin was not his son. Powell was besieged by images of men engaged in "toxic behavior," with no role models to help him understand "that manhood is not, in fact, power, privilege, sex, rock and roll, hip-hop, violence, ego gone wild, material things, money, any of that. That manhood should be about love, peace, non-violence, [and] respecting women as our equals." The theme of manhood recurs in many essays--about Jay-Z, Tupac Shakur, O.J. Simpson, Harvey Weinstein, and Barack Obama, among others--in which Powell regrets the legacy of "patriarchy, sexism, misogyny, violence," and hatred that characterized his relationships with women before therapy, education, and spirituality helped him to figure out "how to be a man who is not a human lethal weapon, to self, to others." Toxic manhood and endemic racism have blighted him, causing "internal wars around self-esteem, staggering bouts with sadness, with depression," and a feeling of "tremendous emptiness." Internalized racism "becomes Black self-hatred, Black abuse" and also generates a "Black elite, the Black gatekeepers," quick to pass judgment on poor blacks. Although racism continues unabated, Powell admits that he has "limitless hope" that efforts of America's young people will change the world.Passion and anger fuel a biting critique.

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August 1, 2018

In a series of 13 essays, writer and political activist Powell (The Education of Kevin Powell) examines race and gender from a sociohistorical context, detailing how white America has committed physical and economic violence against black America. This violence led to the murder of his great-grandfather as well as the mental anguish of living in poverty. Powell shows how Donald Trump's presidency is not an aberration but a legacy of America's history of slavery, Jim Crow Laws, and the assassinations of Emmett Till and Martin Luther King Jr. From Jay-Z's 4:44 to Hamilton to NFL quarterback Cam Newton, sports and music act as a vehicle to highlight injustices as well as to honor those who have fought for their freedoms. The author recognizes that the culture of sexism and violence against women will only end if men take responsibility and change. Powell's complex relationship with his mother is the binding force across these essays as he attempts to understand her life experience. VERDICT Recommended for public and academic libraries. Also seek out Hanif Abdurraqib's They Can't Kill Us Until They Kill Us for a similar analysis of American society.--Chris Wilkes, Tazewell Cty. P.L., VA

Copyright 2018 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

October 15, 2018
The latest book from activist Powell (The Education of Kevin Powell), who has written about the experiences of African-American men in books and at Vibe magazine, compiles 13 previously published essays on hip-hop, sports, politics, and culture that chronicle his growth as a cultural critic. “To be a Black man in America,” he writes, “is to be under a constant state of enormous pressure, stress, and danger, from outside, from within”; his penetrating profiles of celebrities, such as doomed rapper-actor Tupac Shakur and charismatic quarterback Cam Newton, typify the perils faced by and promise of black America. Other essays discuss, for example, Powell’s awakening to misogyny in public and private life, and the contradictions of the hit musical Hamilton, whose casting foregrounds marginalized Americans but whose subject matter reinforces white-centric mainstream views of history. The collection’s title essay is a three-point treatise on Powell’s complicated relationship with his chronically ill single mom, her experiences growing up black in the deep South, Obama’s legacy as the first black president, and the racist backlash that led to the election of Donald Trump. Admirers of Greg Tate’s postsoul aesthetic and Ta-Nehisi Coates’s 21st-century urban realism will find much to savor in Powell’s urgent and eloquent prose.