Through my stories, I hope to expose you to another side of the black experience while offering practical comedic advice based on my own painful lessons learned.
-- Baratunde Thurston (chapter 1)

Importance: Thurston outlines the goals of writing How to Be Black in a frank and unambiguous approach. This is consistent with the straightforward title, the promise of candid revelations, and the use of humor to divulge how the dominant white culture either ignores or places the black community under a microscope. Thurston is quick to convey that his book contains his experience of being black in the United States, but readers, both black and white, will find analogous situations to the ones Thurston writes.

My name has served as a perfect window through which to examine by experience of blackness.
-- Baratunde Thurston (chapter 2)

Importance: In writing about blackness, Thurston finds that many people, in both the white and black communities, believe one is too black or not black...