Angry Black White Boy, by Adam Mansbach

After finishing the Fifth Assassin by Brad Meltzer, I started reading Angry Black White Boy or, The Miscegenation of Macon Detornay, by Adam Mansbach on February 28th, and just finished it this morning.  My husband read this book and considers it one of his favorites.  He gave it to me in my last pile of 3 book options and was quite surprised to see me reading it.  To be honest, I was quite surprised to BE reading it.  This is not a type of book that I would normally pick up for myself.  All along, Husband constantly joked with me about how I would write this one up.  I'm still scratching my head about it, even as I type...

The title alone is somewhat off-putting to me.  Angry Black White Boy.  How does one even try and discuss a book of this nature without offending someone?  I, personally, was offended by the book, and some of the language in it.  When dealing with the subject of race relations, there is always a precarious and very fine line that you need to not cross.  Adam Mansbach gives that line the finger and just goes for it.

This book (fiction) chronicles a period of time in the life of Macon Detornay, a white boy who loves Black culture.  

But we're all white people devils?  Could there be exceptions?  What about that dude Paul C., who'd engineered Eric B. & Rakim's album?  ...   From Macon's confusion had bubbled anger.  How dare black people not see him as an ally, not recognize that he was down?  He retaliated by studying their history, their culture: He was a thirteen-year-old whiteboy in a Malcom X T-shirt, alone at the first annual Boson Hip Hop Conference, heart fluttering with intimidation and delight as scowling bald-headed old schoolers pointed at his chest, demanding, 'Whatchu know about that man?' Which was exactly what he'd wanted, why he'd worn it.  He ran down Malcom's life for them, watched them revise their expressions with inward elation, nodded studiously at their government assassination theories, rhymed when the chance presented itself.  Tagged other graffiti writers' blackooks and wondered what it would take to be scratched from the devil list for good.

Macon moves to New York from Boston to attend Columbia University.  He rooms with Andre, the great grandson of a black baseball player who played on the same team as Macon's great grandfather.  This pairing was by Macon's design.  Macon takes a job as a cab driver and begins robbing his white passengers.  Reports of the robberies hit the press, but they report them as perpetrated by a Black cab driver.  Macon, for some reason, is upset by this and feels the need to set the record straight.  So, he robs another white passenger and insists that the passenger get a good look at him so that he can more accurately describe Macon to the police.  Macon inevitably gets arrested.

Up until the point where Macon gets arrested, I had serious doubts about whether I would finish this book.  It is chock full of the "N" word, a word that I don't like to hear, let alone read.  Macon is written as that white guy who wishes he wasn't.  He makes reference to all kinds of rappers and rap lyrics, and graffiti and graffiti artists.  These are things that I'm not expert in, so it was hard for me to follow and really relate to.

However, once Macon was arrested, the proverbial shit hit the fan, and the book took on an entirely different, and actually somewhat comical and outlandish turn.  The press has a field day with a white man robbing white taxi passengers, and Macon becomes the person du jour.  His roommate Andre, Andre's friend Nique, and a token white girl, Logan, band together and come up with the idea for "The Race Traitor Project" and along with it, "The Day of Apology" whereby white people are called upon to apologize to black people for years of oppression and slavery and racism.  Prior to Macon talking to any press or taking any interviews, Andre, Nique and Logan tried to prepare him:

Macon had consented to a lengthy crash course in interview skills, and until the break of day the team had tradeoff-peppered him with questions and advice to illustrate what Nique called the Basic Presidential Principles.  Macon had learned the Reaganesque technique of responding to hard-nosed inquiries with tangential homespun anecdotes instead of facts, the Nixonian gambit of talking shit while simultaneously claiming high moral ground and a non-shit-talker, myriad Clintonian methods of sidestepping a repeated and reworded question, and the general tactics involved in subverting the agenda of any interviewer and saying what you damn well pleased regardless of circumstance or status.

Needless to say, this "Day of Apology" gets completely out of hand, and New York City becomes one large riot ground with all kinds of violence, looting, and even killing.  Mansbach's description of the shenanigans and the riot are very detailed and realistic, and I could actually imagine the things he wrote happening.  They brought back my memories of watching the Rodney King / Los Angeles riots on television when I was just out of high school.  Mansbach makes reference to those riots several times in the book, and the riots play a large part in Macon's history:

...above Nique's bed was framed a blurry black-and-white freeze-frame of a scene Macon had never forgotten: six of L.A.'s Finest, so murky that they might be figments of imagination, swinging billy clubs with pickax motions as if the huddled mass of Rodney King might be a craggy slab of granite or an arid patch of land.

     "Nice Picture."  [said Macon].

      Nique turned and scowled.  "Nice? Either you got a real limited vocabulary or a serious problem.  Ain't nothing nice about the shit."

      Macon shook his head.  "No, I mean, of course not. I-- What I meant was..."  He gave up on speaking and pushed the left sleeve of his T-shirt to his shoulder.  Tattooed on Macon's biceps in small green characters was 4-29-92.  It was the day the verdict had been handed down, the day Los Angeles had burned.  Andre and Dominique peered in to read it, then looked up at Macon.

...  Nique looked from Andre to Macon and then back to Andre.  He ran a hand over his smooth-shaved head.  "Who is this dude, Dre?" he asked with cinematic incredulity and perfect comic timing, the results of an upbringing replete with four movie channels and unlimited TV privileges. "Mufucker got a Rodney King tattoo? Shit, I thought I was black." 

Some very strange things happen in the last few chapters of the book - the whole book is strange, in my opinion - but the end gets even stranger.  The grandson of another baseball player that played against Macon's and Andre's great grandfathers makes an appearance.  He is a psychiatrist who dabbles in a kind of brain-washing of sorts.  There is an elaborate scheme between the doctor and Nique and Andre to get Macon to do something that blows up in their face.  The ending is quite abrupt and left me shaking my head in disbelief.  Disbelief that what happened in the book actually happened, and disbelief that this is how the book ended.

This book is interesting.  Would it be the first book I recommend to someone to read?  No.  Would I recommend someone NOT read this book?  No.  I say, read it with a grain of salt.