![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() As a civil rights lawyer, activist, legal scholar and mother of three black children, I could not wait to read what Coates had to say to black young people at this moment in our history, a time when many are struggling to make sense of how frequently black lives can be destroyed legally through incessant police violence and mass incarceration. So when I heard that Coates had been inspired, after rereading James Baldwin’s “The Fire Next Time,” to write his own version for the current era, I was overjoyed. He is invariably humble, yet subtly defiant. In a media world populated with pundits, so-called experts and public intellectuals driven by ego and familiar agendas, Coates’s voice stands nearly alone - a black man raised in the streets of Baltimore who narrowly escaped the violence that lurked around every corner and dodged the clutches of the prisons and jails that were built for him, and who now speaks unpopular, unconventional and sometimes even radical truths in his own voice, unfiltered. I do not always agree with him, but it hardly matters. As an African-American, he makes me proud. For the past several years, I’ve greeted Ta-Nehisi Coates’s essays and blog posts for The Atlantic with nothing short of gratitude. ![]()
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