The New Self-Help

To Be Black in America Is to Exist in a Ceaseless State of Absurdity

Anger is inevitable, but allowing it to be the only response to the relentless absurdity of our condition would be suicide

This story is part of The New Self-Help: 21 Books for a Better You in the 21st Century.

Every New Year’s Day, hundreds of people gather together on the banks of the Monongahela, a 130-mile-long river that begins in Fairmont, West Virginia, runs along a stretch of factories, steel mills, and power plants through the Mon Valley and into Pittsburgh. Once there, these people strip and dive in. New Year’s Day, as you probably know, occurs in January, when the average temperature in Pittsburgh hovers somewhere between “hold my beer” and “fuck this shit.” Which means that they’re usually splashing butt-ass naked in an Appalachian Slush Puppie. They call themselves the Polar Bear Club (and their annual dive the Polar Bear Plunge).

Perhaps, while reading that paragraph, an image of a Polar Bear Plunger plopped into your head. Without knowing anything about you, I know — I am certain — that the bare-chested, shivering, and possibly inebriated person you envisioned happened to be White. And not just because Whiteness is such the…