A call to inaction …

… Thomas Chatterton Williams reviews ‘Between the World and Me’ by Ta-Nehisi Coates – LRB 3 December 2015. (Hat tip, Rus Bowden.)

[Coates] presents racism and the racial disparities that still persist in the US despite the undeniable progress that has been made towards equal rights as utterly intransigent and impersonal forces, like a natural disaster, for which no one can be usefully held to account. For blacks, this means that the phrase ‘black-on-black crime’ is nothing but ‘jargon, violence to language, which vanishes the men who engineered the covenants, who fixed the loans, who planned the projects, who built the streets and sold red ink by the barrel’.