“Over the last several years I have read and learned about the Black tax (Kiese Laymon’s Heavy), mass incarceration (Michelle Alexander’s The New Jim Crow), the stunted lifespans of Black Americans (Kenya Barris’s Blackish), and the exhaustion of being Black in white spaces (Austin Channing Brown’s I’m Still Here). What I had not read until now was a memoir which wove together the experience of living with the weight of all of these things. Reggie Ford chronicles his own experiences with the dispassionate remove of someone who survived by normalizing dysfunction and numbing himself to all its associated agony. Later he builds toward his own reckoning with what this normalization has cost him in terms of the damage to his own mental health. Part of his recovery is reading about the historical experiences of being Black in America, and he both finds himself and comes to understand himself within the context of those stories. He brings the same intensity and focus which fueled his academic and athletic success to the task of speaking directly to readers who have lived through the same dysfunction – and to those readers who might have previously denied that any such challenges still exist for Black people in America.”