A massacre at a black church in Charleston, the choking of a black man by a New York police officer for the crime of selling untaxed cigarettes, the shootings of unarmed black men by several other police forces, unrest in Baltimore and in Ferguson, Missouri, after the death of young black men at the hands of police: all these things have booked America in for an intensive session of racial self-analysis. Ta-Nehisi Coates's contribution last year, in an Atlantic essay called "The Case for Reparations", was to describe how northern cities, to which African-Americans escaped during the great migration from the south, dreamed up rules to disadvantage their new arrivals. He has followed it up with "Between the World and Me", a letter to his teenage son on what it is to be black in America in 2015.
展开▼
