In the 150 years since the end of the Civil War and the ratification of the Thirteenth Amendment, which abolished slavery, the history of race and America remains brutally simple. It is the story of the black body, exploited to create the nation's fundamental wealth, violently segregated to unite a nation after a civil war, and still disproportionately threatened, imprisoned, and killed on the streets today. How can America grapple with its troubled racial history? Between the World and Me is Ta-Nehisi Coates' attempt to answer this question.