Though I do not think it is on par with either W.E.B. Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk, or James Baldwin, The Fire Next Time, Coates's essay, Between the World and Me, will speak to our times for those who know or wonder what it feels like to live a black life in America. Yes, race is a social construct, but it a powerful construct that helps explain why the lives lived and felt by blacks is radically different from (though intimately connected to) the lives lived and felt by whites in American. We can not get beyond it my ignoring it, or by thinking, believing, or pretending that it does not matter. That a thing should not matter has little to do with whether it does.
Ta-Nehisi Coates, Between the World and Me (New York: Spiegel & Grau, 2015) ("Why, precisely, was I sitting in this classroom?" "The question was never answered. I was a curious boy, but the schools were not concerned with curiosity. They were concerned with compliance. I loved a few of my teachers. But I cannot say that I truly believed any of them. [] I sensed the schools were hiding something, drugging us with false morality so that we would not see, so that we did not ask: Why--for us and only us--is the other side of free will and free spirits an assault upon our bodies? When our elders presented school to us, they did not present it as a place of higher learning but as a means of escape from death and penal warehousing. Fully 60 percent of all young black men who drop out of high school will go to jail. This should disgrace the country. But it does not, and while I couldn't crunch the numbers or plumb the history back then, I sensed that the fear that marked West Baltimore could not be explained by the schools. Schools did not reveal truths, they concealed them. Perhaps they must be burned away so that the heart of this thing might known." Id. at 276-27.).
