“I feel great about that,” Thurston tells Fresh Air‘s Terry Gross. “I think we have a moment every year in our country where everyone buys black stamps and thinks more explicitly about black people and blackness, so it was a perfect month to release a book on this subject.”

Thurston, a stand-up comedian and The Onion‘s digital director, says that he doesn’t get as many gigs this month as one might think.

Let Baratunde tell you his story.