The Chris Hedges Report with Boyah J. Farah

Boyah J. Farah fled the war in Somalia arriving in the United States as a refugee with his mother and siblings when he was fifteen. His romantic dreams of America quickly ran into the dark undercurrents of American racism. Living in a housing project in Bedford, Massachusetts he was forced to discover the curse of being Black in America, the daily humiliations and small, but insidious ways he was made to constantly feel an outsider by whites. He had experienced tribalism in Somalia. He saw in the divide between whites and Blacks, especially with the political ascendancy of Donald Trump and the far right, the same kind of deadly tribalism here, one that usually leads to internecine violence. He watched as other Somali families succumbed to the poison of American racism, writing that although they had survived the war in Africa, American broke them and carried them off.  America is democratic, he concedes sardonically, for every Black person is, in the end, simply another disposable Black body. Joining me to discuss his memoir America Made Me a Black Man is Boyah J. Farah.