Rarely has a book been so lavishly applauded as Ta-Nehisi Coates’s Between the World and Me was in 2015. The book fetched gushing reviews, admiring interviews in prestigious media, won eminent literary prizes, and almost instantly landed on high school and college required reading lists all over the country. The book’s rapturous reception, as I can’t be the first to note, rather undermined its central assertion that white Americans are natural-born racists and that the United States is and always has been rooted in white supremacy. A nation so constituted would have ignored Coates’s book, or suppressed it. I wondered at the time if he was made uncomfortable by all the praise or if he secretly hoped America’s cultural arbiters would denounce him and demand that bookstores and libraries remove his book from their shelves.