The book, written as a letter to Coates’s teen-age son, begins as Coates struggles with how to help his child after Michael Brown’s killer is not indicted. Ta-Nehisi Coates’s new book, “Between the World and Me,” opens with a similar awakening. That summer, as my country splintered over whether an unarmed black teen-ager deserved to die, something shifted inside me. Two summers before a white policeman assaulted black teen-agers at a pool party, before a white terrorist massacred nine black people in a church, before black churches throughout the South were burned. This was a summer before Michael Brown bled out in the streets, before marches and protests and hashtags crystallized into the Black Lives Matter movement.

'It’s safer.' Then I remembered what he would say to me, in the white college town where we had met, whenever we walked somewhere late at night. 'Why don’t you go home?' I wanted to say. I was worried about him, alone in a park late at night. It was late and I lay in my dark bedroom, long silences hanging between us. That summer, the night Trayvon Martin’s killer walked free, a black friend called me from a park where he’d gone to clear his head. I’ve since memorized a litany of names, an endless march of the young black dead. Two summers since I sat glued to my laptop, streaming grainy courtroom-video feeds, endlessly refreshing and retweeting. When the film’s epilogue revealed that Grant’s killer was sentenced to two years, and he was released after one, someone yelled at the screen, “At least he went to jail!” The audience clapped, as if this were the happiest ending we could hope for. I was a freshman at Stanford when Oscar Grant was killed, living on a campus that was an hour away from the Oakland BART station where Grant, lying face down and handcuffed, was shot in the back by a white officer. Later, I sat in the darkness of a theatre, watching the final moments of a different young black man’s life. I wanted to understand how a jury could determine that a child’s unarmed black body posed more of a threat than a grown man with a gun. I didn’t want to be a conduit for her guilt. I didn’t want to hear her disappointment. Instead, I blinked back tears as a well-meaning white woman approached-she couldn’t believe that verdict, she said, the injustice of it all.

The night Trayvon Martin’s killer walked free, I stood outside a Los Angeles movie theatre, in line to watch “Fruitvale Station.” Maybe I would’ve picked a different movie had I foreseen the verdict, but I was young and hopeful, and I believed that someone would be held accountable for snuffing out a seventeen-year-old’s life.

Coates’s “Between the World and Me” is written as an open letter to his teen-age son.

Prince jones between the world and me