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 a powder keg that has been filling since America's promising but perilous beginning. Everywhere one turned, there was the claim that this might finally be the reckoning that the nation had been promising to undertake for decades.
Michael Eric Dyson's timely new audiobook, 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 antiblackness 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. Along the way, Dyson examines the cultural imperatives of black death, the plague of police brutality, the white theft of black bodies and opportunities, the resort to the often fascist justice of social media instead of the faulty, but far superior justice of the legal system, and the craving for white comfort that has too often cost black people their lives. Ending with a poignant plea for hope, Dyson's exciting new audiobook points the way to social redemption. Long Time Coming is a necessary guide to help America finally reckon with race.
A Macmillan Audio production from St. Martin's Press
