I bought this book as an “Internet Auntie” wanting to support a young Black man whose upbeat Instagram content about Blackness, the sports and entertainment industries, masculinity and other musings occasionally grace my feed—and stop me in my tracks.
Part meandering memoir, part meditation, and part manifesto, this book examines the price of writing from your soul while selling it.
Race trauma is damaging...and lucrative and Chad Sanders lays bare his ambivalence and his vulnerability to this fact with refreshing honesty and poignancy.
His vignettes on navigating white spaces and white proximity within Black spaces, his endless internal deliberations on whether to heed a tingling spidey sense and keep his guard up or a yearning impulse for the freedom to let his guard down -- and the consequences for both -- are heavy, suspenseful and exhausting.
I’m much older than this young man but I find myself gleefully (and sometimes morosely) anticipating the nugget of wisdom that punctuates every sentence. Like his social media content, this book delivers with a sharp wit, authenticity and precociousness that lures you in and makes it impossible to look away, for better and for worse.
‘How to Sell Out’ is polemic and poultice.
Sanders rails against the constraints imposed on artists, particularly Black writers and truth-tellers, who experience and necessarily reproduce race trauma to survive in an anti-black world. (This loop reveals one of the most ironic and horrific examples of supply chain capitalism.)
It is in the very act of writing this book that Sanders offers us and himself a salve to redress the damage done by a never-ending salvo of transgressions against Black bodies and psyches. ‘How to Sell Out’ is both the struggle for and expression of freedom.
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A Mirror, A Testimony, A Reminder: We’ve Always Been Great.
Review of How to Sell Out by Chad Sander How to Sell Out by Chad Sanders hit me on levels I didn’t expect. It’s more than a book; it’s a mirror. Chad writes with the cadence of someone who’s lived multiple lifetimes, his words rhythmic and raw, drenched in a kind of knowing that only comes from constantly navigating the performance of survival. What moved me most wasn’t just the storytelling, which is, by the way, masterful. Chad is a lyrical craftsman. The kind of writer you don’t skim through. You sit with. You listen to. What moved me was how deeply How to Sell Out reveals the subtle, suffocating truth: that Black and Brown people, through no fault of our own, have internalized the lie that we are not inherently great. This country, this world, has fed us that story in every medium possible: schools, screens, systems, and silence. And still, here is Chad, unfolding his journey with a candor that is both beautiful and bruised. There’s some name-dropping in the mix, sure. But to me, it read like someone still excavating his value through the lens this world taught him to use, proximity to celebrity, validation through visibility. It’s not a flaw. It’s a reflection. A product of a culture that teaches us that we’re only valuable when the right eyes see us. But here’s the truth: Chad Sanders is a genius. Whether he knows it fully yet, his power is not in who he knows but in how he sees and invites us to see ourselves. How to Sell Out isn’t a manual for success. It’s a testimony. A soft rebellion in the form of sharp prose. A reminder that our brilliance doesn’t need to be sold to be real. This book is hard to put down because it’s alive. It breathes with rage, honesty, grief, and the unmistakable thrum of hope that says quietly but clearly, we are more than what they told us.
Top reviews from the United States
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- Reviewed in the United States on February 20, 2025Format: Hardcover
- Reviewed in the United States on April 24, 2025Format: Hardcover
Review of How to Sell Out by Chad Sander
A Mirror, A Testimony, A Reminder: We’ve Always Been Great.
Reviewed in the United States on April 24, 2025
How to Sell Out by Chad Sanders hit me on levels I didn’t expect. It’s more than a book; it’s a mirror. Chad writes with the cadence of someone who’s lived multiple lifetimes, his words rhythmic and raw, drenched in a kind of knowing that only comes from constantly navigating the performance of survival.
What moved me most wasn’t just the storytelling, which is, by the way, masterful. Chad is a lyrical craftsman. The kind of writer you don’t skim through. You sit with. You listen to. What moved me was how deeply How to Sell Out reveals the subtle, suffocating truth: that Black and Brown people, through no fault of our own, have internalized the lie that we are not inherently great. This country, this world, has fed us that story in every medium possible: schools, screens, systems, and silence.
And still, here is Chad, unfolding his journey with a candor that is both beautiful and bruised. There’s some name-dropping in the mix, sure. But to me, it read like someone still excavating his value through the lens this world taught him to use, proximity to celebrity, validation through visibility. It’s not a flaw. It’s a reflection. A product of a culture that teaches us that we’re only valuable when the right eyes see us.
But here’s the truth: Chad Sanders is a genius. Whether he knows it fully yet, his power is not in who he knows but in how he sees and invites us to see ourselves. How to Sell Out isn’t a manual for success. It’s a testimony. A soft rebellion in the form of sharp prose. A reminder that our brilliance doesn’t need to be sold to be real.
This book is hard to put down because it’s alive. It breathes with rage, honesty, grief, and the unmistakable thrum of hope that says quietly but clearly, we are more than what they told us.
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- Reviewed in the United States on February 10, 2025Format: Kindle
