Framed as a letter to his son, it often felt like I was reading it surreptitiously. Ostensibly, it wasn't written for me, but I think actually, it was, and the feeling of being an outsider was intended.

Although his experiences growing up were not mine, they were also not foreign to me. I was never a Dreamer, his term for one sleepwalking through life enraptured by a belief in the American Dream. I had the privilege of believing myself White (a turn of phrase I believe he borrows from James Baldwin) but I was small and bullied both at home and in school, brought up by a family who thought they were different (that is to say, better) than their neighbors. I went through life fearful of my body being destroyed, though with a lot less reason to feel that way than he did.

Still, psychology being the way it is, I was an angry, though terrified child who read Malcolm X and wanted revolution. I remember Malcolm discovering the larger Muslim community outside the U.S.A., an event similar to Coates experience of Paris. There's a whole world out there, not free of craziness, but with a different craziness than the one which had seemed like all there was, in that way in which one's childhood sets the stage for everything experienced afterward.

In this book, he's trying to give his son the advantages of his experiences. We all think we can give others a short cut, but I have to wonder if we really can. We save our children from some of the errors we made, only to discover they make their own new ones. Just being alive condemns us to participate in some way in that beautiful struggle.