Hi! My Name is Loco and I am a Racist

Baye McNei | 4.34 | 248 ratings and reviews

Born to Love — Taught to Loathe

McNeil was born and raised in Bedford-Stuyvesant, Brooklyn, New York where some of his earliest encounters with racism were as a child of the Pan-African/Black Power Movement. As a elementary student at a Progressive Pro-Black Family School in the 1970s, between Swahili studies and Black History courses, his school’s hands-on approach to “social studies” often placed him and his classmates, placards in hand, on the frontlines of protest marches, boycotts and demonstrations against everything from police brutality and shootings of unarmed black children in New York to apartheid in South Africa and corporate-sponsored civil war in Angola.

In the early ‘80s, while disco was on its deathbed and hip-hop was a Rug-Rat in diapers, the author was a teen member of a notorious urban cult which touted black supremacy in a volatile community fraught with racial tension, and whose membership rolls held such illustrious names as Rakim, Queen Latifah, Method Man, and Big Daddy Kane.

The author then takes readers on a scintillating and informative journey through the heart and soul of America as a U.S. Army soldier, which he characterized as “a propaganda pressure cooker” yet “a brilliant way to address racial ignorance,” and then back to New York for a bout with corporate bigotry and interracial romance as a university student in Brooklyn. It was at university that he experiences something so surprising and soul-rocking that it will racially alter the course of his life forever. At least, he thought so…then came Japan.

Prompted by his mind-altering experiences in the Land of the Rising Sun, McNeil uses anecdotes and insights from both his youth and his years in Japan to illustrate the insidious nature of racism, and the dangers of responding to it with apathy.

A book that is both a memoir and an impassioned call to arms, Hi! My Name is Loco and I am a Racist tells us in no uncertain terms that while racism continues to be demonized as a dark aberration that only “evil people,” ignorant fools, or people lacking compassion and common decency are subject to, then it will remain at large – hiding in plain sight, in our schools, offices, carpools, living rooms and sometimes even in the mirror. less

Buy on Amazon

Similar Books

If you like Hi! My Name is Loco and I am a Racist, check out these similar top-rated books:

Learn: What makes Shortform summaries the best in the world?

Learn More