What is the author's perspective in the nonfiction book, How to Be Black?

The narrative switches between first person during the memoir writing and second person in the how-to manual essays. Baratunde Thurston presents vignettes from his life—that of an African-American man coming of age in the 1990s in Washington, D.C.—within memoir writing.

The memoir essays of the book are written as an adult recalling his young adulthood. It sits in the knowledge of what is to transpire in Thurston’s life while striving to keep the memoir within the thought processes, knowledge base and events of junior and senior high school years.