Just got tickets to the event in October. Thanks for the heads up!

Perhaps the universe straddles the edge of chaos and justice and, to our limited perception, appears as an arc. Much like how the Earth is round but appears flat.

There are already a number reviews coming in regarding this hot but controversial book. I shall read it. It is on hold for me at Seattle Public Library. I've read a lot of Coates' work. Virtually all of it from the Atlantic. I'm at great odds with him but he is a good writer.

Here is one response of his book from the Right:

http://www.nationalreview.com/article/42…

And another from David Brooks:

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/07/17/opinio…

Finally, while I agree there have been too many young black males killed by police officers, it's important to remember that the DOJ actually cleared Ferguson Police Officer Darren Wilson of any wrongdoing in the killing of Michael Brown. It remains a false narrative.

This narrative on the other hand, is a most tragic one and needs to be addressed most urgently:

http://www.rollingstone.com/sports/news/…

All human lives matter ...equally.

'We are the un-besmirched land of the free.' Who are these people making this claim? Quite a straw man he has there.

@3 Since the Holder DOJ that investigated Ferguson is the same DOJ that engineered the negotiated dropping of all criminal charges aimed at the Wall Street fraudsters who helped bring down the economy in 2008, I don't put much faith that they had any objective other than finding a Ferguson outcome that reduced immediate social conflict to the greatest degree possible. Holder being black doesn't count as much to me as to some because I view anything his DOJ does in light of his successes in his primary missions - to protect Wall Street from 2008 fallout and to block even tiny moves into war crimes inquiry relative to Iraq.

@5 The race-bating Holder and Obama would have loved to hang that officer out to dry but knew that the evidence was against them. That didn't stop Holder from attending that useless thug's funeral and Obama from giving him a shoutout at the UN. Only in the Obama WH does pulling a strong arm robbery entitle you to martyr status. Ok, maybe Hillary's too.

@3 - Coats isn't talking about legalisms. All you need to do is know Michael Brown is dead, and that shit stain who killed all those folks in South Carolina was handled with kid gloves. Police, black and white alike, treat the black suspect differently. Did you watch the Sandra Brown video?

@3, David Brooks is a national joke, and the National Review is simply not a serious publication. It's not just that they're right wing; some inane criticism of Coates has come from the left as well, like Cornel West's embarassing screed, as he sadly sinks further and further into irrelevancy. There are substantive criticisms, like Britni Daniels's take on his blind spot about women at The Root: http://www.theroot.com/articles/culture/…. But most of the perceptive reviews have been raves.

You folks at The Stranger ought to check your listings; you have an entry for Coates speaking at this night and time at Town Hall. It's actually at Arts and Lectures, as this post here states.

@6 Actually, the Obama and Holder's executive branch has been tracking the Black Lives Matter movement like a criminal organization. You've been sucking up too much racist FOX propaganda.

https://firstlook.org/theintercept/2015/…

The primary purpose of this administration is to protect BIG property. The fact that racists like you don't like blacks having power or a place in the heirarchy above you, doesn't change this fact, or mean they are willing to risk the stability of the satus quo in order to move forward a social and economic justice agenda.

Your insecurity and fear around race makes you blind to how you are being used as a tool for players that primarily want you as a rabid shock trooper for their harsher vision of how the wealthy should be able to exploit the rest of us.

The idea that "you can't have America without enslavement" isn't true. Slaves did a lot of work, for which they were paid nothing and treated with incredible violence and unfairness, but free people were still working all the while. Just because our nation's capital was built by slaves doesn't mean it had to be. Building it with freely contracted, paid labor could have been done. Most of our nation's buildings, cities, farms, and industry were, in fact, built by free workers. The entire northern half of the early US had very few slaves and abolished slavery in the early years of the Republic without any bloodshed - and that half was substantially richer, more populous, and massively more innovative than the half that had lots of slaves and had to be shot into submission before it would agree to give up slavery.

It's not incomprehensible why TNC sees America as "a nation defined by white supremacy" - the experience of African Americans is so heavily impacted by racism that it can sure feel like a defining trait of the nation. But the things that define the experience of America for whites - prosperity, opportunity, progress, and democracy - in no way require racism in order to exist. If anything, racism is a drag on white people, because it distorts the economy, causes crime, undermines social trust and solidarity, and poisons politics in ways that have retarded our development as a nation, leaving us all worse off. I am not claiming equivalence here - obviously racism hurts African Americans far more than whites. But the idea that white people benefit from racism is, I'm firmly convinced, totally wrong - any benefits that people think they are receiving are an illusion generated by tribal instincts and the petty desire to make someone else "less than". Without racism, America would be safer, more prosperous, more innovative, more politically functional and more generous to its people, without being any less America.

Also @10, read the book and then see if you still think that way.