Mychal Denzel Smith
Mychal Denzel Smith is a fellow at Type Media Center. He is the New York Times bestselling author of Invisible Man, Got the Whole World Watching: A Young Black Man’s Education (Nation Books 2016) and a 2017 NAACP Image Award Nominee.
His work has appeared online and in print for publications such as the Washington Post, New Republic, New York Times Book Review, The Nation, the Atlantic, Paris Review, Complex, GQ, Guernica, Literary Hub, Pitchfork, Buzzfeed, the Guardian, and many others.
He has appeared as a commentator or MSNBC, CNN, Democracy NOW!, NPR, and numerous other national/local radio and television outlets. In 2014 and 2016, TheRoot.com named him one of the 100 Most Influential African-Americans in their annual The Root 100 list.
Recent Work
Real Black History
Real Black History (Abridged).
Mychal Denzel Smith on Full Frontal with Samantha Bee.
Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez Doesn’t Have Time to ‘Learn the Job.’ Neither Did Shirley Chisholm.
Ocasio-Cortez, like Chisholm before her, is driven by an urgency not typically found in American politicians.
By Mychal Denzel Smith in Esquire.
The Gatekeepers
On the burden of the black public intellectual.
Historical Amnesia About Slavery Is a Tool of White Supremacy
Where we have (mostly) condemned slavery, we as a country have refused to condemn its defenders.
What Mizzou Knew
One year later, the University of Missouri football team’s boycott still hasn’t been duplicated. Colin Kaepernick’s silent protest is a start, but what if pro athletes refused to play?
Invisible Man, Got the Whole World Watching: A Young Black Man's Education
How do you learn to be a black man in America? For young black men today, it means coming of age during the presidency of Barack Obama. It means witnessing the deaths of Oscar Grant, Trayvon Martin, Michael Brown, Akai Gurley, and too many more. It means celebrating powerful moments of black self-determination for LeBron James, Dave Chappelle, and Frank Ocean.
In Invisible Man, Got the Whole World Watching, Mychal Denzel Smith chronicles his own personal and political education during these tumultuous years, describing his efforts to come into his own in a world that denied his humanity. Smith unapologetically upends reigning assumptions about black masculinity, rewriting the script for black manhood so that depression and anxiety aren’t considered taboo, and feminism and LGBTQ rights become part of the fight. The questions Smith asks in this book are urgent–for him, for the martyrs and the tokens, and for the Trayvons that could have been and are still waiting.
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