Stakes is High: Life After the American Dream

Smith is a journalist whose work has appeared in The New York Times, Washington Post, Harper’s, Artforum, Oxford American, New Republic, and The Nation, among others. As a Black man living in the US, Smith expresses his fear, his disillusionment, and his outrage with the conditions in which Black Americans still live today, despite the incremental progress that has been made. His beliefs are formed by lived experiences, many of which are framed in the backdrop of New York, more specifically in his adopted Brooklyn. Smith is acutely aware of his community and how others perceive his neighborhood. He writes, “I know what where I live is the hood, and not only because I am in a part of Brooklyn where a substantial number of black people still live” (57), going on to explain how the difference between his neighborhood and more affluent ones is defined in part by the absence of trash cans. This insight is representative of his ability to interpret the world around him, to give language to the atrocities that are allowed to continue in the United States towards Black Americans. In his explanation of the context of the book, Smith confides in the reader: “I wrote, scrapped, rewrote, and edited this book through what I now see as a prolonged depression” (182).