Summary

As he begins his introduction, which is titled “Living While Black is an Extreme Sport,” the author considers the irony of white people engaging in extreme sports like polar bear swims and cliff diving. That irony exists, he suggests, because of the privilege involved in white people having to put their lives at risk in order to feel alive, a circumstance that the author says black people experience every day. He narrates one such typical everyday experience, being pulled over by police while driving, in the style of an American action film, using satirical humor to point out the absurdity of what he and other black people in America have to go through in such circumstances – i.e., those in which their life and well-being is genuinely endangered simply because they are existing while black. He also describes how he and other...