Ben Passmore’s Black Arms To Hold You Up: A History of Black Resistance offers an irreverent but sobering tribute to the flawed lives and indisputable courage of Black radicals and their political legacy. Rendered in a cartoon-style that can be sublime as well as zany, Passmore’s “Black Arms” refers to both a loving embrace and the cold metal of a gun. In his story, a bald Black dude named Ben, and his dashiki-clad dad, take the reader on a wild metaphysical leap through the grim history of American racism via stories of Black activists and rebels prepared to defend Black lives by any means necessary.
In this 10-page excerpt, we first encounter Ben viewing a phone video of the senseless police shooting of Philando Castile. Black Arms To Hold You Up: A History of Black Resistance by Ben Passmore is out now from Pantheon.
