Georgetown University sociology professor Dyson (What Truth Sounds Like) offers heartfelt letters to victims of racial injustice in America. In a letter to Emmett Till, Dyson considers how the phenomenon of inherited racial trauma ("We feel the history in our bones") reverberates through every high-profile racially motivated killing. Writing to Eric Garner, Dyson refers to police as the "blue plague" and "violent enforcers of white supremacy." In a letter to Breonna Taylor, Dyson examines how Black people stolen from Africa "resisted complete submission to slavery" by faking illness, spoiling crops, and saving their energy during the day to attend dances, worship, and steal food at night. The letter addressed to 15-year-old Chicago murder victim Hadiya Pendleton veers somewhat abruptly into a tangent about cancel culture and the legacy of basketball star Kobe Bryant, but concludes with a cogent call to build a "solid and substantive notion of racial amnesty" for white people "who own up to the fact that they haven't got this race thing right." Dyson also provides valuable historical and sociopolitical context in his vivid descriptions of how Ahmaud Arbery and George Floyd died. Rich with feeling and insight, this elegiac account hits home. (Dec.)

In a series of profound and powerful letters written to Black martyrs to racial violence--Elijah McClain, Emmett Till, Breonna Taylor, Hadiya Pendleton, Sandra Bland, and Reverend Clementa Pinckney--and addressing many more along the way, including a list from "the last decade alone" of more than 100 names, distinguished professor, preacher, public intellectual, and best-selling author Dyson (Jay-Z, 2019; What Truth Sounds Like, 2018) offers both homage and history, emotion and analysis. With "Black Lives Matter" as the racial justice movement's rallying cry, Dyson places the murders of African Americans within the context of financial inequality, urban violence, cancel culture, and police brutality and fatal force. At times speaking directly to white Americans who wobble on the precipice of understanding, Dyson evinces both empathy and bewilderment over the current state of disconnection between so many segments of society. From the contrast between the survival skills honed by enslaved people and the persistent reverence for the Confederacy, this nuanced interpretation of America's egregious abuses of its Black population is at once broad and specific. Dyson's eloquent, exacting, and consequential scrutiny of "the racial calamity at the heart of our democracy" is a catalyst for discussion and continued calls for justice, a work essential to the struggle to achieve insight, genuine change, and healing.

A scholar of race looks to the future with hope. In his latest, an apt follow-up to What Truth Sounds Like and Tears We Cannot Stop, Dyson, a Baptist minister, sociology professor, and contributor to the New York Times and the New Republic, offers a sweeping overview of racism in America through the pretext of letters to seven victims of racial violence: Elijah McClain, Emmett Till, Eric Garner, Breonna Taylor, Hadiya Pendleton, Sandra Bland, and the Rev. Clementa Pinckney. Cellphone videos have made such violence shockingly public, stoking widespread anguish: George Floyd's death, in particular, "struck a nerve." Although Dyson acknowledges that "something feels different," he asks, "how far are we willing to go? Are we prepared to sacrifice tradition and convention for genuine transformation?" Each letter offers the author an opportunity to expand upon the complexities of Blacks' experience of hatred and oppression and to offer tempered suggestions for change. In his letter to Garner, for example, Dyson acknowledges that "Black bodies are still an object of scorn and derision" and "of nearly unconscious rage that rattles the cavernous egos of some men who think themselves mighty because they sport a badge and a gun and have referred swagger." To counter what he calls the "blue plague," the author proposes reconstructing police administration "so that the chain of command is shared with multiple agencies of safety and protection" as well as "redesign[ing] the architecture of police units and dispers[ing] their duties across a number of agencies while decentralizing both their composition and their authority." Writing to Pendleton, killed when she was 15, he shares the "righteous anger" her death provoked, but he warns against responding with cancel culture, which he likens to fascism and sees as "a proxy for white supremacy." In his letter to fellow clergyman Pinckney, Dyson reveals his enduring yet cautious faith in humanity. A timely, fervent message from an important voice. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.