I've been an admirer of Ta-Nehisi Coates' writing for some time. It is consistently uncompromising, humane, clear-headed, original. (Maybe whoever is all of the first three can't help being original too.)
The cover of his current book, Between the World and Me, features a blurb from Toni Morrison which says simply, "This is required reading." That is undoubtedly true for different reasons for white and black readers. But it is not just one more in the long stream of volumes of personal memoir or political commentary. Coates's directness, probing, and honesty are scalpels that don't just carve open the wound of "race" for inspection, but will also carve open the reader who is willing to lend him attention.
Being a long letter to his fifteen year old son, it is clearly not addressed to white people. It is part of that humaneness I mentioned that he has allowed us to eavesdrop. And Toni Morrison is right: we all owe it, not just to Americans of color, but to ourselves, to do so.
You may think you are liberal. You may think you are in solidarity with the struggle. And that may be so. But let me assure you: this emotional and intellectual powerhouse will make you confront complacencies you never knew you had. Coates doesn't accuse. He doesn't have to. He shows. He gives us Burns' extraordinary power to see ourselves as others see us, as the aliens that white people down through the centuries, and today through so many of our continuing institutions, have always insisted that we were supposed to be.
He also shows us the cost it imposes on black Americans, makes very concrete the depth of continuity between slavery and today's racism, that we are prone to think of as so much more subtle. As those who have been following Shaun's work here know, it has no subtlety at all as it plays out in our courts and jails and blood-splashed streets. But Coates compellingly connects the dots back to America's original sin, and the ways in which dreamers of the "American Dream" have always imperiled black bodies. All of it is intertwined with a father's tenderness and pride, and an insatiably querying spirit reminiscent of Malcolm X. No one else could have written this book, I think. And now no one else has to.
I'm not going to add anything below the orange dingbat. Do yourself a favor, and go read Mr. Coates instead.