What's A Black Man Like You Doing In A Place Like This

A testimony to experience the reality of racism in our own skin.

For a long time, I hated myself for being black. At home, my whole family ate rice with peanut sauce from the same bowl and sometimes without cutlery, with our hands. Behind closed doors I hated it and wondered why we couldn’t be like everyone else.

With this sentence begins this powerful testimony that reveals the extent to which racism is present in our society and how it conditions people’s lives. What’s a Black Man Like You Doing in a Place Like This is the question that lies behind many of these cases of racism. It is the consolidation of a story in which it is always ‘them’, the outsiders, those who will never be from here.

Gerehou honestly addresses all those who are seeking a personal, direct and well-founded approach to racism in society in the last thirty years. He tries to situate racialized people as political subjects, while unraveling the role between victims and executioners. The author narrates in a didactic, simple and sometimes hilarious tone the everyday racism and the most microscopic discrimination, shedding light on what is not seen and providing a vision of reality beyond victimhood.