I found the first four years of essays fascinating as an exploration of a man and a writer finding his footing and his voice, but I found Years 5 ("Fear of a Black President") and 6 ("The Case for Reparations") to be some of the best essay writing I've had the pleasure of reading.

This essay collection was enhanced for me by having just read [b: Just Mercy|20342617|Just Mercy A Story of Justice and Redemption|Bryan Stevenson|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1635827409l/20342617._SY75_.jpg|28323940] and [b: The Color of Law|32191706|The Color of Law A Forgotten History of How Our Government Segregated America|Richard Rothstein|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1493422076l/32191706._SY75_.jpg|52832599]. I think, five years ago, "The Case for Reparations" would have been entirely mind-blowing to me. Reading this in 2022 after the summer of 2020, it just reads as an excellently-crafted argument for the only option to begin righting the wrongs our nation is built upon.

Some of the passages I found to be most moving (setting aside Coates' insightful analysis) were on...
The American mythos being fundamentally rooted in white supremacy:
[Pages 211-5]

I now knew that the line dividing black and white America was neither phenotypical, nor cultural, nor even genetic. In fact, there was no line at all, no necessary division of any kind. We were not two sides of a coin. We were not the photonegative of each other. To be black in America was to be plundered. To be white was to benefit from, and at times directly execute, this plunder. No national conversation, no invocations to love, no moral appeals, no pleas for "sensitivity" and "diversity," no lamenting of "race relations" could make this right. Racism was banditry, pure and simple. And the banditry was not incidental to America, it was essential to it.

[...] The need for purpose and community, for mission, is human. [...] The popular notion that America is so exceptional in its virtue that even its invasions are alchemized into liberations lends meaning to the political lives of citizens. [...] [Political leaders] are awarding virtue and meaning to one group by warring upon another. White supremacy is a crime and a lie, but it's also a machine that generates meaning. This existential grift, as much as anything, is the source of its enormous, centuries-spanning power.

[Page 289]

I believed that the answer to the question of the color line was right in front of us. Rob a people generationally and there will be effects. I also understood why that answer, barring extreme external events, would never be accepted and reckoned with. It simply broke too much of America's sense of its own identity.

This one strikes me particularly because of the context of the summer of 2020 that appeared to awaken to consciousness a huge number of white people to structural racism and ongoing harms. "External events" as Coates mentioned involved the attempted coup on 1/6/2020, climate-change-fueled apocalyptic wildfires in California, COVID-19 pandemic lockdowns, and the high-profile lynchings of several black people (Ahmaud Arbery, Breonna Taylor, George Floyd, Daniel Prude, Rayshard Brooks, among others) in the spring and summer of 2020: These things combined incited racial riots and protests country-wide. MANY white people seemed to "wake up" to the violence and enduring power of white supremacy in the United States. Some have reverted to "business as usual" but others are continuing to learn.

The spirit of defiance in the face of tragedy:
[Pages 109-112]

There was a time when I believed in an arc of cosmic justice, that good acts were rewarded and bad deeds punished, if not in my lifetime, then in the by-the-by. [...] I would like to believe in God. I simply can't. The reasons are physical. When I was nine, some kid beat me up for amusement, and when I came home crying to my father, his answer--Fight that boy or fight me--was godless, because it told me that there was no justice in the world, save the justice we dish out with our own hands. [...] I understood: No one, not my father, not the cops, and certainly not anyone's God, was coming to save me.

Nothing in the record of human history argues for divine mortality, and a great deal argues against it. What we know is that good people very often suffer terribly, while the perpetrators of horrific evil backstroke through all the pleasures of the world. There is no evidence that the score is ever evened in this life or any after. [...] Life was short, and death undefeated. So I loved hard, since I would not love for long. So I loved directly and fixed myself to solid things--my wife, my child, my family, health, work, friends.

I found, in this fixed and godless love, something cosmic and spiritual nonetheless. [...] All of these heroes [of black rights] had failed to cajole and coerce the masters of America. Their ambition of a better world had been frustrated. This was the story of my ancestors, the story I expected for myself. These were not stories of hope, but were they without import? [...] they had succeeded in living by their own. And that was all they could control. [...] The lessons they passed down were not about an abstract hope, an unknowable dram. They were about the power and necessity of immediate defiance.

[...] I too would gather my words and scream into the roaring waves, because to scream was to defy the story, and that defiance had meaning, no matter that the waves kept coming, would come, maybe, forever. The masters could lie to themselves, lie to the world, but they would never force me to lie to myself. [...] The world might fall off a cliff, but I did not have to be among those pushing it and more, I did not have to nod along while fools insisted that gravity was debatable.

[Pages 289]

[...] There is something demeaning about repeatedly yelling "I am a human" in a world premised on denying that fact. [...] I don't ever want to forget that resistance must be its own reward, since resistance, at least within the life span of the resistors, almost always fails. [...] Our story is a tragedy. I know it sounds odd, but that belief does not depress me. It focuses me. After all, I am an atheist and thus do not believe anything, even a strongly held belief, is destiny. And if tragedy is to be proven wrong, if there really is hope out there, I think it can only be made manifest by remembering the cost of it being proven right.