How do you express when something weighs heavily on your soul? Weighs heavily on your opportunities? Weighs heavily on your very existence?

In his searing memoir, Heavy, Kiese Laymon lays bare his experience of the immense burden of being black in the United States. Growing up, his mother surrounded him with an incessant drumbeat to be better than any white person could require him to be, by using perfect grammar, an expansive vocabulary and an extensive reading list. He did this while also living the life of a black boy in Mississippi seeking to develop a vocabulary of pride in blackness and solidarity with his peers. The immense toll that that these clashing stressors took on his psyche and his body often emerged in his weight. His life was heavy and so was his body. When as an adult he took control of his weight through diet and exercise, it became obsessive in the reverse.

This is a brilliant man whose observations of the world should make us all look more closely at our own lives and the society in which we live. Reflecting on his childhood and the challenges to being “a healthy, safe black boy in Mississippi,” he recognizes that society trains anyone with any kind of power to harm those weaker, be it boys/girls, straight/gay, parent/child, white/black, and we do not acknowledge this harmful type of socialization. “I didn’t know how to tell…but I knew how to run, deflect, and duck” (pp. 27-28). We, too, are exposed to this training, sometimes overt and explicit, and sometimes by the behavior of family, friends, teachers, and media. This is a burden to those harmed and to those committing the harm.

When reflecting on his substantially segregated education, Laymon observes, “my teachers maybe did the best they could but they just needed a lot of help making their best better…They never once said the words: ‘economic inequality,’ ‘housing discrimination,’ ‘sexual violence,’ ‘mass incarceration,’ ‘homophobia,’ ‘empire,’ ‘mass eviction,’ ‘post-traumatic stress disorder,’ ‘white supremacy,’ ‘patriarchy,’ ‘neo-confederacy,’ ‘mental health,’ or ‘parental abuse,’ yet every student and teacher at that school lived in a world shaped by those words” (p.114).

His story is one of a love of reading and writing and family, but also of addictions to food and gambling. It is a story of parental love and encouragement and also parental abuse. He does not shield his loved ones with denials of harm, but with the context of battles with personal demons aggravated by the burden of striving to be a black academic in a biased system. People are not just one thing; they are complex mixtures of strengths and weaknesses and subject to forces often beyond their control.

Laymon flags the multitude of biases and challenges created by centuries of discrimination and are still present that add up to an immense burden on being black in the United States. This story is his in the particulars but everyone’s when you stop to think about it.