![]() ![]() If he wore a tie, wing-tipped shoes and kept his hands strapped and calm at his sides, he could get his Blackness as low as 4.0.” When a white man murders five African American children and walks free because he claimed he was threatened, Emmanuel’s outrage bursts forth with a vengeance, but it also awakens confusion and uncertainty. ![]() He constantly dials back his Blackness: “In public it was impossible to get his Blackness to anything near a 1.5. ![]() This defiance is particularly strong in the opening story, “The Finkelstein 5.” Emmanuel, the main character, tries to morph his identity in order to avoid discrimination. In the presence of the absurd, they question themselves and come up with the answer, ‘It’s not me, it’s you.’ Yet the stories are charming and caustic, memorable because they are full of sharp characters who are aware that their world is upside down. ![]() It’s more like this dysfunctional scenario is a couple of decades into the future. In Friday Black, Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah presents us with a dystopia that, unfortunately, doesn’t seem too removed from our reality (schools push drugs on children to make them happy, people go to amusement parks to enact shootings, a white man gets acquitted of murdering five African American children on the basis of self-defense). ![]()
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