Amber Ruffin

This book is both hilarious and horrifying. Amber Ruffin is a comedian and host of her own late night show The Amber Ruffin Show on the NBC streaming channel Peacock (which I recommend watching!). She is also a writer for Seth Meyers Late Night. She and her sister Lacey, co-author on this book, grew up in mostly-white Omaha, Nebraska. This collection tells stories from each of their lives about encounters with racist people. The stories are real and, despite the humor, hard to believe in a show more "how can this happen in modern America?" kind of way. They are told with humor, but there are so many the authors are able to categorize them into groups and pick one or two as examples as the same racist things keep happening to them over and over.

It's hard to believe people could still be so ignorant in this day and age. It's not like there are no other black people living in Omaha, or that all of these stories happen in the mostly-white midwest. But the way some of these white people act you'd think they had never met a black person in their lives and are completely ignorant of the realities of being black in America . . . oh, wait. . . So, yeah, still so much to learn and progress to be made. I am terrifically sorry Amber and Lacey have to deal with this shit on a daily basis. I know I couldn't do it with the same grace and humor.

The book is excellent on audio, but if you only read the audio you will miss the photos that illustrate some of these stories. If you read on audio, I recommend picking up the print book also! show less

Years ago I tried to tell my book club of a couple of articles I'd read that documented poor pregnancy outcomes in Black women compared to White women regardless of education or financial status. They thought I was nuts or at least exaggerating. Amber Ruffin and Lacey explain the phenomenon perfectly even though there's nothing about pregnancy in the book. There's this middle-class family of well-educated nerds, they love art and literature and math. They love sitting at the front of the show more class so the teacher can see what smarties they are. Yet throughout their lives, wherever they go (J. C. Pennys is prominent) they're assumed to be poor, ignorant, thieving prostitutes. As Amber says, "What?" If one of the things that happened to them happened to me I would be in a complete tizzy, yet they have to endure mean racist comments, off-hand racist comments, or "well meaning" racist comments continually. Amazingly, they have kept their sense of humor, but such attacks have to keep a body continually stressed, continually ready for fight or flight. Human bodies are not supposed to function under such assault. And Amber laughs through the whole book, and little Lacey is a bodybuilder. The combination of the horrid subject matter with Amber's comedic presentation is magical. show less

God damn this is a tough listen, and it makes me horrified to know that white people are this racist. Amber Ruffin is a comedian, so she keeps up this very upbeat voice acting while telling these stories about her sister Lacey (& some of hers too); it made me keep uttering these laughing yelps of horror throughout. I want every white person to read/listen to this and hopefully come to some sort of reckoning with themselves. It’s helping me in calling out other white people and paying show more attention in my life too. show less

Amber Ruffin, a comedy writer and cast member on Late Night with Seth Meyers and the host of her own late night Amber Ruffin Show, and her sister Lacey Lamarr relay stories of sometimes funny but always appalling racism that they experience as Black women in America.

Lacey lives in Omaha, Nebraska, which - in case you didn't know, as I didn't before picking up this book - is in fact one of the larger cities in the U.S. You'd think white people would be, at the very least, used to interacting show more with Black people without putting their feet in their mouths (at best) or being egregiously racist (at worst). But no, this book will fast disabuse you of that notion. Amber and Lacey relay the stories - most of them, but not all, happened to Lacey - of interactions running the gamut from awful teachers to racist co-workers to random strangers in the grocery store putting their entire hand in a Black woman's hair. Some made me laugh, but most made me angry, and opened my eyes further to the presence of racist behavior and stereotyping in the U.S., as well as the emotional energy it takes to deal with it on such a regular basis. show less