How To Be Black

Baratunde returns to hometown DC for How To Be Black Event February 13

Pimp daddy Baratunde -love the jacket

Come one come all. Come have a ball! Monday February 13th will feature special back-to-back events with me! I’m coming home. We’ll start with a 6:30 pm presentation/reading/Q&A at the National Press Club then move to Blackbyrd at 14th & U for the official after party. 

It’s the heart of Black History Month plus How To Be Black plus Chocolate City. It doesn’t get much blacker. Come out, get books, laughs and autographs and just kick it. Blackly. Yes, I just invented a new adverb: blackly

Full event details are here on Facebook where we encourage you to RSVP so we have a count. Note that you’ll have to RSVP for the National Press Club portion (by emailing opus@press.org) which has a cover charge of $5.

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Baratunde talks about How To Be Black on NPR’s Fresh Air.

“It’s no coincidence that Baratunde Thurston’s new memoir and satirical self-help book How to Be Black was slated for release on the first day of Black History Month.

“I feel great about that,” Thurston tells Fresh Air’s Terry Gross. “I think we have a moment every year in our country where everyone buys black stamps and thinks more explicitly about black people and blackness, so it was a perfect month to release a book on this subject.”

Read NPR’s full write-up here: http://www.npr.org/2012/02/01/146198412/baratunde-thurston-explains-how-to-be-black

“He made an example. He pointed to a kid across the way and said, ‘That kid’s an Oreo.’ And I didn’t know the kid’s name at the time — I saw this nerdy black kid with glasses hanging out with white friends … And that was the first introduction of this concept, inauthentic blackness because you’re comfortable around whiteness.”

Baratunde Thurston on the term ‘oreo’ (via nprfreshair). So exciting!!!

(via nprfreshair)

Reblogged from NPR Fresh Air