Michelle Alexander, Ta-Nehisi Coates


The chroniclers of the modern black experience.

Gabriella Demczuk/The New York Times/Redux Pictures

Toni Morrison has compared Ta-Nehisi Coates to James Baldwin, the famed 20th-century black writer, and there’s a good case to be made. Already renowned for his essays calling President Obama too silent on race and arguing for reparations for the descendants of slaves, the Atlantic writer this year offered another blockbuster treatise about being black in America. Released in a year of intense racial conflict—police killings of young black men, demonstrations and riots, a racially motivated mass murder and an ensuing debate about the Confederate flag—his book, Between the World and Me, could hardly have felt more timely. Addressed to Coates’ teenage son, the book offers an extended version of “the talk” many black parents have with their children about the hard truths of growing up knowing they are statistically more likely to be arrested or jailed—knowing, as Coates writes, that “[t]he plunder of black life was drilled into this country in its infancy and reinforced across its history.” Whether challenging the preaching of nonviolence in the Baltimore protests or admitting to not understanding how black Charlestonians could forgive the white supremacist who murdered their family members, Coates is confronting Americans with racial realities many would deny or not care to admit.

Chronicling systemic, deliberate and historical racial oppression is something Coates shares with Michelle Alexander—the law professor, lawyer and former ACLU Racial Justice Project leader whose widely acclaimed The New Jim Crow, published in 2010, now looks prescient. Years before events like Ferguson built up outrage at a racially uneven criminal justice system that politicians on the right and left now want to fix, Alexander was arguing that mass incarceration had created a new design for the old racial caste system: “No other country in the world imprisons so many of its racial or ethnic minorities,” Alexander wrote. While some, including Coates, were conflicted about whether mass incarceration constitutes a new Jim Crow, he argued then—as he does now in his book—that there’s a greater point: “America’s entire history is marked by the state imposing unfreedom on a large swath of the African-American population. Whatever the successes of the past 50 years, there is no evidence that trend has ended.”
