If mainstream America had been asked 5 years ago about the state of our racial divide, many may have said it is non-existent compared to the America of our past. After all, we have elected a black president. But with the recent deaths of both black men and police officers, and the obvious anger across our country over these occurrences, can we admit that we have a long ways to go? 
 Ta-Nehisi Coates tells his son about the America he has known, from the hard streets and underfunded schools of Baltimore, where he grew up, to working as a journalist, his current profession. He tells him about America's past, and it's present. His experiences are told from the perspective of a black man, and written in the form of a personal letter to his boy. It reads that way, but it's also obvious that it was not written with the intention that he be the only audience. It's a letter/memoir for Americans. I wouldn't say it's directed at specific race, gender, or that only our country could benefit from opening its pages, because when you get down to it I don't think there is place in the world that does not discriminate in some form or other. 
 "America believes itself exceptional, the greatest and noblest nation ever to exist.... One cannot, at once, claim to be superhuman and then plead mortal error. I propose to take our countrymen's claims of American exceptionalism seriously, which is to say I propose subjecting our country to an exceptional moral standard." 
 "The Dreamers will have to learn to struggle themselves, to understand that the field for their Dream, the stage where they have painted themselves white, is the deathbed of us all." 
 Early on Ta-Nehisi talks about simply surviving his youth in the black neighborhoods of Baltimore. "I never wanted you to know these streets", he tells his boy. There are questions there as well. These questions are why, and were these neighborhoods and attitudes born from so many years of segregation? Finding his way in the middle, Coates makes his way out and into Howard University. It is there that he meets the wife that would bear their son, but also the other people who would teach him about ancestry and black history. The teachings of the late Malcom X became one of his prominent activist guides. I wish it would have been Martin Luther King Jr. I say this because within this memoir there is some anger. Anger at the situation of our country and the police for unjust killings of black men, especially that of Michael Brown. I see where some of this anger comes from. There have been many serious wrongs by the police, but I hope that most of them also want what's right. There is a place for anger, but how much does it help? Other people may misconstrue the anger, and replace it with violence. To be fair, Coates used this example because it was happening at the time of his writing. What happened to Brown followed by the trial personally affected his son. 
 I don't think this memoir was written to provide every answer. What it does provide is awareness of the problem and a call to be better, and that in itself is an answer. So it's good that Coates speaks. Awareness is a beginning to understanding, because if we don't at least listen, then we certainly have accomplished nothing.