Being black today means trying to make sense of unarmed men of color dying at the hands of police, of a country professing enlightenment while struggling – more than a century and a half after slavery’s end – to alleviate racial inequity and unrest.

Ta-Nehisi Coates eloquently expresses the frustration and fear inherent in the African-American experience in the seminal Between the World and Me, written as a letter to his 14-year-old son. The book is this year’s common read for first-year students at the University of Kansas.

Shawn Alexander, an associate professor of African and African-American Studies and director of KU’s Langston Hughes Center, discusses Coates’ powerful text as a jumping-off point for examining race in 2016-17.