Disorientation: Being Black in the World

HILARY WESTON WRITERS' TRUST PRIZE FOR NONFICTION FINALIST

"Honest, vulnerable, courageous and funny..." —Lawrence Hill, author of The Book of Negroes

Bestselling, award-winning writer Ian Williams brings fresh eyes and new insights to today's urgent conversation on race and racism in startling, illuminating essays that grow out of his own experience as a Black man moving through the world.

With that one eloquent word, disorientation, Ian Williams captures the impact of racial encounters on racialized people—the whiplash that occurs while minding one's own business. Sometimes the consequences are only irritating; sometimes they are deadly. And Williams offers a perspective that is distinct from the recent, almost exclusively America-centric, bestselling books on race, because of one salient fact: he has lived in Trinidad (where he was never the only Black person in the room), in Canada (where he often was), and in the United States (where as a Black man from the Caribbean, he was a different kind of "only").

Inspired by the essays of James Baldwin, in which the personal becomes the gateway to larger ideas, Williams explores such things as the unmistakable moment when a child realizes they are Black; the ten characteristics of institutional whiteness; how friendship forms a bulwark against being a target of racism; the meaning and uses of a Black person's smile; and blame culture—a stumbling block to meaningful change because no one feels responsible for the systemic structures of the past. Examining the past and the present in order to speak to the future, he offers new thinking, honest feeling, and his astonishing, piercing gift of language.