Earlier this term my religion writing class discussed James Baldwin’s The Fire Next Time, which was an inspiration, we noted, for Ta-Nehisi Coates’s National Book Award-winning Between the World and Me, reviewed here by Michelle Alexander, author of The New Jim Crow. On December 3, the London Review of Books published a piece of dissenting opinion on the book by Thomas Chatterton Williams, who also recently wrote a thrilling essay on Baldwin for the New Yorker Page-Turner blog. (Williams had written in a slightly different tone about Coates’s book for the Washington Post this summer.) The writing is fabulous, the viewpoint fresh, and maybe a snippet will get you to read it. So, here’s a little Williams:

The acceptance of [Coates’s] pessimistic assessment means that forty million people must be seen as permanent victims. That would have alarmed black intellectuals of previous generations – including James Baldwin, whose authority Coates frequently invokes.

Photo credit: Luke Abiol