Between the World and Me by Ta-Nehisi Coates

This is both painful to read and very important to know and think about.  This is the James Baldwin of our time.  This is the beginning of a discourse on what it is to be a person of color in America.  Coates has won that position for himself with this book, and  the competition is not even close to him. In an America consumed by debates over racism, police violence and domestic terror, it is Coates to whom we can turn to mold our views from the clay that is our culture.
This book is written as a letter to the author’s teenage son, conveying the personal and historical struggle to “live free in this black body,” a body that faces the constant, exhausting threat of state-sanctioned violence. But the book also reads like an open letter to white America, to the well-meaning sorts who at some point might have said, “Yes, things are bad, but they’re getting better, right?” It is to them that Coates is delivering this stern, fatherly talk.  The hell it is.  On the one hand it is no longer acceptable, in most of the country, to talk openly about lynching people.  Not all of the country but most of the country.  The realities of where we were and where we are and where we should want to go are all succinctly laid out.