Welcome to Litsy!

To many people in the Obama era, America finally succeeded in “going beyond race,” putting the divisions of the past behind us. And then 17-year-old Trayvon Martin was shot by a wannabe cop in Florida; and then Ferguson, Missouri happened; and then South Carolina hit the headlines; and then Baltimore blew up…Suddenly the entire country seemed to be waking to a stark fact: African American men are an endangered species. Now the country’s urban war zone is brought powerfully to life by a rising young literary talent, D. Watkins. The author fought his way up on the eastside (the “beastside”) of Baltimore, Maryland—or “Bodymore, Murderland” as his friends call it. He writes openly and unapologetically about what it took to survive life on the streets, while the casualties piled up around him, including his own brother. Watkins pushed drugs to pay his way through school, staying one step ahead of murderous business rivals and equally predatory lawmen. When black residents of Baltimore finally decided they had had enough—after the brutal killing of 25-year-old Freddie Gray while in police custody—Watkins was on the streets when the city erupted. He writes about his bleeding city with the razor-sharp insights of someone who bleeds along with it. Here are true dispatches from the other side of Obama’s America.