To Be Black in America Is to Walk with Fury

Book excerpt: A Vintage Shorts Original Selection Twenty years ago, the publication of Nathan McCall’s groundbreaking memoir Makes Me Wanna Holler chronicled a black man’s passage from a life on the block to the prison yards to a journalism career that led to The Washington Post. McCall’s survival had been an act of defiance against a culture and political system designed to keep black men down. Today, from the halls of a revered university, McCall gives thought to how many white Americans remain conditioned to racial blindness and can’t see their way out. Our country’s promise of equality continues to ring hollow, as young black men are murdered on our streets and constrained behind bars in astonishing numbers. In this timely, intimate essay, Nathan McCall reflects on what it means to stand tall and fashion life on one’s own terms, and urges us to recognize that what will make America great is not growing its wealth or might overseas, but doing right by its people at home. An eBook short.