Long Time Coming
Reckoning with Race in America
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- $14.99
Publisher Description
AN INSTANT NATIONAL BESTSELLER
This edition includes illustrations by Everett Dyson
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.
“Powerfully illuminating, heart-wrenching, and enlightening.” -Ibram X. Kendi, bestselling author of How to Be an Antiracist
“Crushingly powerful, Long Time Coming is an unfiltered Marlboro of black pain.” -Isabel Wilkerson, bestselling author of Caste
"Formidable, compelling...has much to offer on our nation’s crucial need for racial reckoning and the way forward." -Bryan Stevenson, author of Just Mercy
The night of May 25, 2020 changed America. George Floyd, a 46-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.
APPLE BOOKS REVIEW
With razor-sharp scholarship and fiery passion, sociologist Michael Eric Dyson explains why America desperately needs the Black Lives Matter movement. Drawing a direct line from the first slave ship that landed on North American shores to today’s epidemic of police violence against Black Americans, Dyson lays out the facts of systemic racism. He links these historical observations directly to the recent police-related deaths of people like George Floyd and Breonna Taylor, and draws upon his own stories of life as a Black man. Dyson pulls no punches in this call to action, arguing that we can’t fight for a more equitable future without truly coming to terms with a long history of sanctioned violence against Black people. A necessary read, Long Time Coming breaks America down so that it can be built up again—stronger than ever.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Georgetown University sociology professor Dyson (What Truth Sounds Like) offers heartfelt letters to victims of racial injustice in America. In a letter to Emmett Till, Dyson considers how the phenomenon of inherited racial trauma ("We feel the history in our bones") reverberates through every high-profile racially motivated killing. Writing to Eric Garner, Dyson refers to police as the "blue plague" and "violent enforcers of white supremacy." In a letter to Breonna Taylor, Dyson examines how Black people stolen from Africa "resisted complete submission to slavery" by faking illness, spoiling crops, and saving their energy during the day to attend dances, worship, and steal food at night. 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." Dyson also provides valuable historical and sociopolitical context in his vivid descriptions of how Ahmaud Arbery and George Floyd died. Rich with feeling and insight, this elegiac account hits home.
