What does the author credit with having defined his attitudes and values as a person and as a black man as noted in the memoir, What Doesn’t Kill You Makes You Blacker?

The neighborhoods and homes in which the author lived as a child are considered at different points in the narrative as having defined his attitudes and values as a person and as a black man. At different points in the narrative, he describes the roughness of the neighborhood and house in which he lived as a child, and how his parents, like so many other black people, were determined to both move up and give the impression of moving up, both economically and socially. The homes and neighborhoods to which they moved were part of that process, and part of the family's experience of making sure they were perceived as not being defined by their origins in what the author calls "the hood."