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Long Time Coming: Reckoning with Race in America

Long Time Coming: Reckoning with Race in America

by Michael Eric Dyson

St. Martin's Press ·2020 ·230 pages ·Essays
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59/99
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57/99

Critics

Near the Top

61/99

Readers

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Scholars

62/99

Rating

52/99

Volume

70/99

Rating

52/99

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About This Book

From the New York Times bestselling author of Tears We Cannot Stop, a passionate call to America to finally reckon with race and start the journey to redemption. The night of May 25, 2020 changed America. George Floyd, a 43-year-old Black man, was killed during an arrest in Minneapolis when a white cop suffocated him. The video of that night's events went viral, sparking the largest protests in the nation's history and the sort of social unrest we have not seen since the sixties. While Floyd's death was certainly the catalyst, (heightened by the fact that it occurred during a pandemic whose victims were disproportionately of color) it was in truth the fuse that lit an ever-filling powder keg.Long Time Coming grapples with the cultural and social forces that have shaped our nation in the brutal crucible of race. In five beautifully argued chapters—each addressed to a black martyr from Breonna Taylor to Rev. Clementa Pinckney—Dyson traces the genealogy of anti-blackness from the slave ship to the street corner where Floyd lost his life—and where America gained its will to confront the ugly truth of systemic racism. Ending with a poignant plea for hope, Dyson's exciting new book points the way to social redemption. Long Time Coming is a necessary guide to help America finally reckon with race.


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Reviews

"a timely, heartfelt book that uses history to slice our nation open and show how racism is a sickness that has shaped our culture and society in a variety of insidious ways ..."

Gabino Iglesias· NPR Read review ↗ Top of the Pile

"Dyson offers both homage and history, emotion and analysis ..."

Carol Haggas· Booklist Read review ↗ Top of the Pile

"Some passages in the book are almost poetic, as Dyson riffs from one subject to the next and from the historical to the contemporary with the improvisational flair of a jazzman."

Michael A. Fletcher· The Washington Post Read review ↗ Near the Top

"The letter addressed to 15-year-old Chicago murder victim Hadiya Pendleton veers somewhat abruptly into a tangent about cancel culture and the legacy of basketball star Kobe Bryant, but concludes with a cogent call to build a 'solid and substantive notion of racial amnesty' for white people 'who own up to the fact that they haven't got this race thing right'."

Publishers Weekly Read review ↗ Near the Top

"Each letter offers the author an opportunity to expand upon the complexities of Blacks' experience of hatred and oppression and to offer tempered suggestions for change ..."

Kirkus Read review ↗ Near the Top

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