Me and Black MAGA

Billy McCoy opens Me and Black MAGA with a young man sitting in a Minneapolis library, waiting for a bus to an ICE protest, wearing a red MAGA hat. A stranger grabs his arm. The argument that follows sets the whole book in motion: a Black man trying to explain himself to a world that has already decided what he is.

That premise carries real weight. McCoy is writing about something true: the gap between the politics a community assigns you and the life you’re actually living. His narrator grew up shaped by an illiterate mother, a manipulative church employer, and work that keeps him at the bottom. He put on the MAGA hat not out of malice but out of belonging. That’s a human story, and when McCoy trusts it, the book delivers.

The strongest chapters follow the narrator through his job at Ebenezer Manor, where his supervisor, Mark, rules the basement with contempt and chicken bones. The workplace scenes are specific and honest. Mark is the kind of man who mistakes cruelty for authority. Watching the narrator absorb that treatment and slowly stop absorbing it is where the book earns its pages.

The final interview with Vera is the scene McCoy builds toward. She sits across a desk, looks at his recommendations, and tells him the truth: merit doesn’t count here. “Merit is diddly squat.” A caged macaw in the corner keeps calling out I can’t see you. It’s a scene about invisibility, and it lands clean.

The book struggles when it steps away from that story. McCoy loads the novel with essays on mythology, fascism, and political theory. Some of this material sharpens the argument. The idea that Christian Nationalism functions as mythmaking, emotion dressed as history, is worth sitting with. But the passages run long, and they crowd out the character work that makes the narrator’s journey matter. A reader following this young man’s life doesn’t need Mussolini’s 1922 Naples speech to understand what’s happening to him. The story already shows it.

The narrator’s voice is the book’s best asset. He’s funny about his own contradictions, honest about his education, and clear-eyed about how seduction works on a person who hasn’t been given better tools. His mother, barely present, haunts the margins: illiterate, devout, and preyed upon. She deserved more pages.

McCoy is writing toward something real about family, class, and what it costs a person to stay loyal to a community that doesn’t protect him. That’s a story worth telling, and this book tells parts of it well.

For readers who want a narrative grounded in consequence and character, the patience required pays off. Start with Chapter 8. Stay for Vera.