MAKES ME WANNA HOLLER: A Young Black Man In America

By Nathan McCall

While sociologists and really, any chump with an opinion -- scramble to broadcast their outsiders' views on "what is wrong with young black men," Washington Post reporter Nathan McCall packs the actual goods into his memoir, Makes Me Wanna Holler.

Brutally honest, Holler transcends McCall's own experiences and bears witness to the universal despair among black youth. It's full of great laughs, rare insights and repugnant revelations about the nature of humankind.

Although the young McCall (Nate to his friends) does fit some stereotypical depictions of black males, this isn't yet another exploitation-ridden ode to some skirt-chasing, drug-selling, whitey-hating brother from the slums.

Nate is an A student from a working-class family, obsessed with ensuring that he avoids the plight of his father -- trapped and constantly "catching hell" from a white society that rides him like a mule for a pittance of a payback.

McCall takes us right inside the mentality of the streets and inside the mind of a wimpish kid who somehow blossoms into one of the baddest players around.

McCall's rage against the white mainstream is born in 1966 when he's a sixth-grader at a previously segregated Portsmouth, Virginia, school.

It's here that he learns to "hate as blindly and viciously as any of them." The young McCall finds that venom hard to control, and it turns into self-hatred -- which he unleashes on other blacks.

Not surprisingly, McCall is initiated into that American black rite of passage -- prison -- by the age of 20.

With a conversational, matter of fact tone and a lyrical style that is true to roots in the 'hood, the unshakable drawing power of Makes Me Wanna Holler lies in McCall's ability to maintain the story's intensity through all his tribulations, triumphs and moments of lunacy.

This is a perfect contemporary complement to the Autobiography Of Malcolm X and an invaluable read for anyone, black male or otherwise, still trying to understand the underlying mechanisms that can drive our actions.

--sigcino moyo

original publication: NOW