Damon Young on His Book 'What Doesn’t Kill You Makes You Blacker'

Damon Young is the author of the book What Doesn’t Kill You Makes You Blacker (2019), about surviving in a world where “existing while Black is an extreme sport.” In a New York Times story published March 25, 2019, Young explained the challenges he faced while writing about his experiences, "I didn’t want to encapsulate my existence as very traumatic and downtrodden, like 'Great Expectations.' So much of the national dialogue about race deals with either terrible trauma or black excellence. I was more interested in the space in between, because that’s where I exist. So the challenge was finding a space between sensationalizing and also documenting and contextualizing." A senior editor for The Root, Damon Young is co-founder and editor-in-chief of the online magazine, VerySmartBrothas, an integral component of The Root. VSB was dubbed "the blackest thing that ever happened to the internet" by the Washington Post. Young is also a columnist for GQ.com, and the author of Your Degrees Won't Keep You Warm at Night: The Very Smart Brothas Guide to Dating, Mating, and Fighting Crime.