Yet here I am Lessons from a Black man's search for home

The noted journalist recounts his reckonings with sexuality, love, racism, and many other charged topics. Early on in his memoir, Capehart, best known as a commentator for MSNBC and as an editorial writer for theWashington Post, writes of being known among his Southern cousins as "Mr. Peabody," the bookishly bespectacled cartoon dog. "And I was a little 'funny,'" he adds. "That was the gentler f-bomb used for someone believed to be gay back then." Raised in New Jersey, Capehart writes of being one of the few, if not the only, Black students in his classes, which, accompanied by annual holidays in North Carolina, gave him a precisely contoured understanding of race and racism: "Blackness is always at the mercy of someone else's judgment. You can be too Black, not Black enough, or not Black at all….Some Black people are eager to take away my Black card. Some white people would rather I not mention my race at all." A pointed lesson came from his mother, who prophesied that his friendships with white children would turn unequal as the years went by. Sadly, this came to pass, and, despite an elite education and plum jobs in journalism, he would learn that "education and money offer no real protection from racism." Another pointed lesson came decades later, when Capehart resigned from theWashington Post editorial board after he realized that he would never quite be received as the "interlocutor between Blacks and whites" that he hoped to be: "And once again, it felt like the whiter world let me know where it believed my place to be." Fortunately, Capehart has refused to accept silence, so that his voice, calmly defiant, is still heard outside the confines of this welcome book. A lively, sometimes rueful, always illuminating look at the business of journalism by a knowing practitioner. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.