Powell - My mother, Barack Obama, Donald Trump, and the last stand of the angry white man: an autobiography of America

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PRAISE FOR MY MOTHER. BARACK OBAMA. DONALD TRUMP. AND THE LAST STAND OF THE ANGRY WHITE MAN.

Kevin Powells writing never fails to be both profoundly insightful and brilliantly inciting. His words are unassuming daggers, piercing the skin of racism in America, gender inequality, misogyny, and the sociopolitical impact of our greatest icons while expertly avoiding clichs and pretension. His work provides a compassionate examination of our contemporary ethos and inspires us to move beyond apathy into full social accountability.

D OMINIQUE M ORISSEAU , O BIE A WARDWINNING PLAYWRIGHT

Hip-hop has been the most influential cultural force of the last fifty years, and no writer has understood its power quite like Kevin Powell. Its not just music. Its a lens to understand the world, and Kevin Powell wields it to further our understanding of racism, manhood, and our troubled political times. Make no mistake about it: whether writing about Harvey Weinstein, his mother, or American football, this book is hip-hop in the best sense of the phrase, in that it challenges the readers to step outside of themselves. Powell takes us to a place beyond the beats. Its a place most fear to tread, but if we hope to salvage this country, its a place we all need to understand.

D AVE Z IRIN, WRITER AND EDITOR FOR T HE N ATION

Kevin Powell thoughtfully weaves together the connective tissue between gender, race, sexuality, pop culture, and sports through a series of raw, incredibly personal essays. He masterfully uses his own life experiences to force us to take an uncomfortable look at how weve been conditioned to adopt, accept, and extend the unfortunate American traditions of hate and violence.

J EMELE H ILL , ESPN ANCHOR, COMMENTATOR, WRITER

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Copyright 2018 by Kevin Powell

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First Atria Books hardcover edition September 2018

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Jacket design by Kerry DeBruce

Author photograph by Kevin Powell

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available.

ISBN 978-1-5011-9880-9

ISBN 978-1-5011-9881-6 (ebook)

For the rainbow childrentoday, tomorrow, in the future....

The tragedy of life is not death but what we let die inside of us while we live.

N ATIVE A MERICAN P ROVERB

For a long time, I was scared Id find out I was like my mother.

M ARILYN M ONROE

The answer, my friend, is blowin in the wind.

B OB D YLAN

Well its like cranes in the sky Sometimes I dont wanna feel those metal clouds.

S OLANGE

We are all part of one another.

Y URI K OCHIYAMA

The only way to deal with an unfree world is to become so absolutely free that your very existence is an act of rebellion.

A LBERT C AMUS

M y name is Kevin Powell and I am a writer, I am an artist. I say this with great pride, today, because I have not felt this sort of thing for many years, until the middle of this decade, to be mad honest. You see, I have known I wanted to be a writer since I was a child, kept it to myself because in the world in which I was born, given my name, and told, almost immediately, what I could and could not do, who I could and could not be, there were no examples for poor people like me to be an artist, to be a writer. Or at least it was never told, not to me. So: I buried my dream of being a writer and guarded my imagination closely, except for those days in our Jersey City, New Jersey, tenement where I would speak aloud, as my mother went about her business, of my friends who were not there, of the countless characters I imitated from our broken-down television set. From where did I get that imagination and that love of storytelling? Why, my ma, of course, she of the American South, the Low Country of South Carolina: folks who are and speak in a beautiful, tongue-twisting dialect they call Geechee. My mothers stories captivated me, then, now, regardless of how many times I heard them, because they were a story of people, of a people who had done nothing that bad to be so black and blue, yet they were. And it was my ma who took me, when I was eight years old, to the Greenville Public Library on John F. Kennedy Boulevard in Jersey City, and allowed me to roam free, to find myself, my imagination, my voice, amongst those dusty books with the strange titles. As my voice changed and my height grew I would come to inhale the words of Ernest Hemingway, Edgar Allan Poe, William Shakespeare, Charles Dickens, S. E. Hintonwriters who fed me, fed my American hunger for adventure, for escape, for a better life than what I had. And thus a writer I became, eventually, like for real, at Henry Snyder High School when my twelfth-grade English teacher, Mrs. Lillian Williams, spotted something in the way I wrote and encouraged me to enter a city-wide essay contest. I won, at age seventeen, the only thing I had ever won in my life, except for a few medals as a track runner. I was shocked, proud, felt alive in a way I could not express, in those innocent days, as a woefully shy teenager with a bad temper and dangerously low self-esteem. By age twenty, while a full-time student on a financial aid package at Rutgers, the State University of New Jersey, as they call it, I was not only writing for various campus newspapers but also commuting from Central Jersey to New York City collecting my first paychecks as a professional writer. That young Kevin said as he raced to the top of the world: I am on a mission and in a hurry. In my early twenties I enlisted in the army of fearless and idealistic poets in New York spitting our hastily scribbled words here there everywhere; by my mid-twenties I was writing cover stories for Quincy Joness Vibe magazine, and at that publication I would also document the life and times of Tupac Shakur; and on behalf of Rolling Stone magazine I was there in Las Vegas when Pac tragically died at twenty-five. As for me, by age thirty I was burnt out, a has-been, a drunk, suicidal, dazed and confused about what to do with myself as a writer, contemplating on many a night how my rites of passage had swung so wildly between great success and embarrassing failure