From the NYT:
Ta-Nehisi Coates Wins National Book AwardUh, the cop was black.
By ALEXANDRA ALTER NOV. 18, 2015
Ta-Nehisi Coates won the National Book Award for nonfiction Wednesday night for “Between the World and Me,” a visceral, blunt exploration of his experience of being a black man in America, which was published this summer in the middle of a national dialogue about race relations and inequality.
“Every day you turn on the TV and see some kind of violence being directed at black people,” Mr. Coates said in an emotional acceptance speech. “Over and over and over again. And it keeps happening.” …
Mr. Coates, a correspondent for The Atlantic, dedicated the award to Prince Jones, a college friend of his who was shot to death by a police officer who mistook him for a criminal. “I’m a black man in America. I can’t punish that officer; ‘Between the World and Me’ comes out of that place,” Mr. Coates said. “I can’t secure the safety of my son. I just don’t have that power. But what I do have the power to do is say, ‘You won’t enroll me in this lie. You won’t make me part of it.’ ”
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“Between the World and Me,” which was published by Spiegel & Grau, was one of the most celebrated and widely discussed books of the year. The novelist Toni Morrison compared Mr. Coates to James Baldwin.Here’s my review of his National Book Award-winning book.
And here’s my review of his article “The Black Family in the Age of Mass Incarceration.”
