Coates, possibly the most important writer at this moment in America, wrote a long letter to his son about growing up and being Black:
“I knew that my portion of the American galaxy, where bodies were enslaved by a tenacious gravity, was black and that the other, liberated portion was not. I knew that some inscrutable energy preserved the breach. I felt, but did not yet understand, the relation between that other world and me. And I felt in this a cosmic injustice, a profound cruelty, which infused an abiding, irrepressible desire to unshackle my body and achieve the velocity of escape.”
The article is adapted from his upcoming book Between the World and Me. It also is about his boyhood in West Baltimore, subject of Coates’ great first book, The Beautiful Struggle. Read it all.
Thoughts?