BLACK ARMS TO HOLD YOU UP

Birth of a violent nation.

In this trenchant graphic novel, the author is at home, lounging on a sofa in sweatpants, when his father walks in the door, having passed burning cars and a helicopter overhead. “You’re not on the street like everyone else?” the old man asks, wondering why his son isn’t protesting the police killing of a Black man. “Must think I have a death wish!” Passmore replies. “Get this cocoa butter condescension out of my house!” Beret-wearing Dad has his own powerful rejoinder: He slaps his son’s head with a book on Black liberation. The wallop sends Passmore back in time, taking him on an involuntary odyssey in which he witnesses injustices meted out to Black people throughout history—brutality that is met with resistance. It’s a shocking awakening for the young man, even if it takes time to sink in. “I’ve seen dudes get beat by cops already,” Passmore says when transported to a scene of police confronting Black men in New Orleans in 1900. “Why’d you bring me to caveman times for this?” Passmore soon finds out: One of the men is Robert Charles, who, after being clubbed, shot an officer—and was shot himself. Passmore dodges gunfire in the ensuing conflict. “Yo dad, beam me up!” he screams. “I’m not getting killed by Gone With the Wind bullets.” On his journey, Passmore sits in on a trial, attends Emmett Till’s funeral, and beholds violent clashes. In a meta turn, he addresses a TV audience’s concerns that he left out this or that historical episode. The tone of the book—drawn in lively black and white and pink images—is alternately haunting and hilarious, as when Passmore, author of the comic book series Daygloayhole, imagines what Martin Luther King Jr.’s “I Have a Dream” speech sounded like to terrified whites, the impassioned minister envisioning the South “transformed into a paradise of interracial whoopie!”

A mordant and highly original graphic novel that has readers reconsider Black resistance.