Early on in his memoir, Capehart, best known as a commentator for MSNBC and as an editorial writer for the Washington Post, writes of being known among his Southern cousins as \u201cMr. Peabody,\u201d the bookishly bespectacled cartoon dog. \u201cAnd I was a little \u2018funny,\u2019\u201d he adds. \u201cThat was the gentler f-bomb used for someone believed to be gay back then.\u201d Raised in New Jersey, Capehart writes of being one of the few, if not the only, Black students in his classes, which, accompanied by annual holidays in North Carolina, gave him a precisely contoured understanding of race and racism: \u201cBlackness is always at the mercy of someone else\u2019s judgment. You can be too Black, not Black enough, or not Black at all\u2026.Some Black people are eager to take away my Black card. Some white people would rather I not mention my race at all.\u201d A pointed lesson came from his mother, who prophesied that his friendships with white children would turn unequal as the years went by. Sadly, this came to pass, and, despite an elite education and plum jobs in journalism, he would learn that \u201ceducation and money offer no real protection from racism.\u201d Another pointed lesson came decades later, when Capehart resigned from the Washington Post editorial board after he realized that he would never quite be received as the \u201cinterlocutor between Blacks and whites\u201d that he hoped to be: \u201cAnd once again, it felt like the whiter world let me know where it believed my place to be.\u201d Fortunately, Capehart has refused to accept silence, so that his voice, calmly defiant, is still heard outside the confines of this welcome book.<\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Early on in his memoir, Capehart, best known as a commentator for MSNBC and as an editorial writer for the Washington Post, writes of being known among his Southern cousins as \u201cMr. Peabody,\u201d the bookishly bespectacled cartoon dog. \u201cAnd I was a little \u2018funny,\u2019\u201d he adds. \u201cThat was the gentler f-bomb used for someone believed […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":0,"featured_media":2947,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2946","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-interesting"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2946"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=2946"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2946\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/2947"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2946"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2946"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2946"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}