AMERICA MADE ME A BLACK MAN

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.