Ta-Nehisi Coates won the National Book Award for non-fiction yesterday for Between the World and Me, which has been described as "the searing best seller about being black in America."
He dedicated the book to his friend from Howard University, Prince Jones Jr., who was killed in Fairfax, Va., by
a police officer in 2000 "because he was mistaken for a criminal,"
Coates said. Alluding to shootings of blacks by police this year, Coates
said, "At the heart of our country is the notion that we are OK with
the presumption that black people have a predisposition toward
criminality."
No comments:
Post a Comment