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This test consists of 5 short answer questions, 10 short essay questions, and 1 (of 3) essay topics.

Short Answer Questions

1. Where is Howard University located?

2. Whom does the author describe as his "wedding ring"?

3. What view does the author have of the afterlife?

4. What is "the Yard"?

5. Who is Linda Heywood?

Short Essay Questions

1. What conflicting thoughts does the author have about the civil rights movement of the 1960s?

2. What is meant by "Tolstoy is the Tolstoy of the Zulus?"

3. Why did the author's mother encourage him to write?

4. Why did the author's son experience such extreme grief when Michael Brown's killer was set free?

5. What assumptions does the author make about PG County (Prince George's County) police officers and why?

6. According to the author, how have American police departments been given the right to destroy black bodies without the fear of recrimination?

7. What role did violence play in the author's childhood?

8. How important were books to the author as he was growing up?

9. According to the author, how has the lack of fathers and father-figures affected black children?

10. What is the symbolism behind the author's son's name?

Essay Topics

Write an essay for ONE of the following topics:

Essay Topic 1

Fear is a recurring theme in the author's memoir. What role does fear play in the lives of black Americans? How has fear preserved the author's body? Has fear repressed the author? What are some of the positive and negative effects of the fear he has experienced throughout his life?

Essay Topic 2

Throughout history, defining oneself as Black was a matter of both appearance as well as culture. There were people who chose to define themselves as White/Caucasian as a means of improving their social status. Describe how the author defines “blackness” in current American society. How did his experiences with other people, such as the girl from California who had relatives in India, the girl with dreadlocks raised by a Jewish mother, and the Howard professor who was in an open marriage to a white woman affect his view of what it meant to be a Black person?

Essay Topic 3

The moment Samori realized the death of Michael Brown would not be avenged; the instant that a four-year-old (Dr.) Mable Jones was pulled away from the front of the bus; the split-second the author realized through the medium of television that there was another world outside of his inner-city Baltimore - what do all of these points in time have in common? What one lesson did each person learn in his or her critical moment? How might other black Americans have faced similar racial epiphanies?

(see the answer keys)

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