Micah McCrary is a contributor to Bookslut. His essays, reviews, and translations have appeared in Brevity, the Los Angeles Review of Books, MAKE, Third Coast, and Midwestern Gothic, among other publications. He co-edits con•text, is a doctoral student in English at Ohio University, and holds an MFA in Nonfiction from Columbia College Chicago. His manuscript, Island in the City, was a finalist in the Cleveland State University Poetry Center 2015 Essay Collection Competition.
Normally my being black makes my being American complicated, but in Paris I found myself perhaps saved by my nationality, by a particular foreignness, with my blackness possibly somewhat overlooked.
“There will be people who’ll cross the street to avoid you because you’re black,” my mother would tell me when I was younger, in every conversation or argument about race we ever had.