“Awkward Thoughts” is the latest addition to a small canon of “awkward” work by black creatives. The word has appeared recently as both an adjective and a cultural geotag, locating a book, TV show or podcast left-of-center on the spectrum of Black Cool. Most famously, Issa Rae, the writer, actress and star of HBO’s “Insecure,” rose to fame via the web series “The Misadventures of Awkward Black Girl” and a memoir of the same name published in 2015. “Are you thinking (perhaps awkwardly),” Bell writes, “that you need help sorting through the stuff that makes up America in order to attempt to figure out how we should remake America?”
In this book, “awkward” is a filter, a way to view the author’s thoughts on the remaking of this country. Bell deconstructs the country’s contradictions through the prism of his own life, via meditations on the Democratic Party, Denzel Washington, Doc McStuffins, the…
