Ta-Nehisi Coates's 'Visceral' Take on Being Black in America - The New York Times - 0 views
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he expressed reluctance to be drafted as white America’s designated racial explainer or the activist whom some at the church on Wednesday seemed to want.“I’m a writer, and for me, writing is a very internal process that’s all about trying to learn something and then show it to people,” he said in the interview.In a brief talk to a group of students from a local school before the reading, he had put it more bluntly. Advertisement Continue reading the main story Understanding how an unjust situation came about “is deeply therapeutic,” he told them.“It will keep you from going crazy,” he continued.
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In the book, Mr. Coates describes racism in terms of assaults on the free movement of the black body, whether by the officers who shoot unarmed men or in more everyday incidents, like the casual shoving of Samori when he was 4 by a white woman on an Upper West Side escalator.
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“I wanted to make racism tactile, visceral,” he said. “Because it is.”
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