Trained to Hate but Designed to Love

An autobiography that details an African-American man’s lifelong struggle with institutional racism and the faith that guided him through it.

Debut author Accuracy provides a harrowing glimpse into the black American experience in this slim volume while also recounting a life that can only be called quintessentially American. Raised in rural East Texas, Accuracy played Little League baseball as a child, enlisted in the armed forces as a young man, and later served as a correctional officer, all the while maintaining a deep commitment to his Christian faith. Yet even in his youth, he knew that the culture around him perceived him as an other—a lesson he learned hard after he reacted to a white person’s slur: “This man chased me around the school with a knife in his hand, saying that he was going to cut my throat....I didn’t get any help from anybody at the local high school…not even from the coaches, fans, or parents, who were all white.” The book touches on numerous other incidents of racial bias—such as military kangaroo courts, discussions with white supremacist inmates, his son’s unearned run-in with a police gang unit—all of which brim with barely concealed violence. The story itself is split into four parts, excluding a lengthy introduction, and often comes off as rough and tangled, changing course abruptly to make a political point or offer one of many pithy biblical quotes. At times, it becomes difficult to discern exactly what sort of book Accuracy has written—Christian meditation or social criticism, political treatise or memoir. In the end, it’s all four of these, in spite of its hiccups in technique. Overall, though, the author makes a strong case for taking “an inventory of yourself.”

A choppy but moving chronicle of belief and perseverance in a hostile homeland.