In 1963, James Baldwin, aged thirty-nine, published the open letter to his nephew, aged fifteen, that forms the first part of The Fire Next Time. In 2015, Ta-Nehisi Coates, aged thirty-nine, published an open letter to his son, aged fifteen, titled Between the World and Me.1 The book is Coates’s The Fire Next Time.

To use a sample of two is not, of course, in any sense a scientific way to measure the change in relations between black and white in America, or in the condition of whom Baldwin in those days had no hesitation in calling “the Negro”; but it seems to me that no such scientific way really exists, and that if we could say only what could be scientifically proved we should soon be reduced to silence. This is not quite the same, however, as saying that the subject is beyond rational discussion: but such are the emotions and the posturing that it calls forth that cool and rational discussion is rare.

Are things, grosso modo, better or worse now for blacks than in 1963? The very question is that posed by Ralph Ellison in his description in Invisible Man, published in 1952, of his protagonist’s reaction to the statue of the founder of the state college for Negroes:

his hands outstretched in the breathtaking gesture of lifting a veil that flutters in hard, metallic folds above the face of a kneeling slave; and I am