Ta-Nehisi Coates is a black writer. And his writing is about blacks living in the United States. I tripped over his name maybe a year ago as he is a columnist online for The Atlantic Monthly. One of my favorite writers for many years is James Fallows, also with The Atlantic, and perhaps he mentioned Ta-Nehisi once. I started reading Ta-Nehisi’s posts and have found him a very good read, very intelligent, very committed to understanding as best he can the situation of blacks in America.

Ta-Nehisi is coming out with his second book on Tuesday, July 14. I have already pre ordered the digital version and will start reading him tomorrow. The title is “Between the World and Me”. In it he writes to his 14 year old son. (Update: His son is 14. Originaly I wrote his son was younger.) So this is a writing approach for getting a difficult message into comprehensible form. Not my conclusion. Ta-Nehisi has written about his efforts.

We do not have many blacks in Bellingham and it might be a question why this book deserves attention. Two reasons. One is the question of why we have so few blacks in Bellingham. The second reason is we are all Americans - citizens of the United States - and we have a national issue with our history of race, to put it mildly. Ta-Nehisi has already shown an amazing ability to block the white noise and hear the real narrative being played out in America. He brings brilliance to his writing and we can learn much from him. And we need to.