Lunch with the FT: Ta-Nehisi Coates - FT.com

"At the start of this year, Coates, who turns 40 on Wednesday, was a fairly well-known journalist. He had published a little-read memoir about growing up in Baltimore, The Beautiful Struggle (2008), but his reputation stemmed chiefly from a 2014 article for the Atlantic magazine arguing that the US should pay black Americans reparations for slavery. Then, this July, his slim book Between the World and Me was published in the US amid national furore over the #blacklivesmatter movement, protests in Baltimore and the massacre of black churchgoers by a white man in Charleston, South Carolina. The book argues that the “destruction of black bodies” is not simply a constant of American history but the very foundation stone of white American “progress”.



Lunch with the FT: Ta-Nehisi Coates - FT.com