Ta-Nehisi Coates offers a framework for understanding our nation's history and current crisis. Americans have built an empire on the idea of "race," a falsehood that damages us all but falls most heavily on the bodies of black women and men -- bodies exploited through slavery and segregation, and, today, threatened, locked up, and murdered out of all proportion. What is it like to inhabit a black body and find a way to live within it? And how can...

"An extraordinary exquisitely written memoir (of sorts) that looks at race in a fearless, penetrating, honest, true way. ... 'I am black-and brown, too,' writes Emily Bernard. 'Brown is the body I was born into. Black is the body of the stories I tell.' These twelve telltale, connected, deeply personal essays explore, up close, the complexities and paradoxes, the haunting memories and ambushing realities, of growing up black in the South with a family...