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I explored some derelict buildings over the weekend. Hopped a fence and skulked around in the ruins. It was fun to be out of bounds. I'm 41, it's been a long time since I skulked.

It's the privilege of white men. Women have additional concerns. Black people can get shot for skulking. My body, which has been defined as white, is almost invincible. No one wants the headache of fucking with a white body. I skulk with impunity.

Ta-Nehisi Coates () isn't addressing me - this book is to his son - but of course if it was only for his son he didn't have to publish it. He's using the same rhetorical device many rappers do. The majority of their audiences are white, so they're speaking to them, but white people don't like it to be admitted and probably neither do rappers. Everyone pretends that something else is happening.

Coates would like me to think about black bodies - about the tremendous vulnerability of black bodies, which can be broken at will and with impunity. That sounds insane to say, but he's writing in the shadow of Trayvon Martin and this happens, like, all the time, so it's hard to argue with it.

He says this word, "body," insistently. "How do I live free in this black body?" It's important to him. He means to talk about his specific body, his son's body, the real vessel, what it means when one is broken. The exact toll of American history, what he calls the Dream, on an exact person. When his friend Prince Jones is murdered by a police officer, Coates talks about all the moments that came before that murder - the vacations, the piano lessons, the groundings, the college acceptance, all the things that got spilled out along with the blood of that body.

He isn't interested in blaming the officer who shot his friend. The officer is a symptom. "The problem with the police is not that they are fascist pigs but that our country is ruled by majoritarian pigs," he says.

This is powerful writing. Coates has a strategy: swooping out to generalizations, back into specific stories. A white woman pushes his son on an escalator. He loses his temper, which he's ashamed of. Black people might ask whether they'd lose their tempers. White people might ask how we would have seen that scene. Other white people automatically took the woman's side. Maybe they didn't see the push. Maybe they just saw an angry black dude. Maybe they didn't think about how this moment stands for this dude's entire life.

He covers some other things as well. 9/11. Malcolm X. Atheism - Coates, like me, has "rejected magic in all its forms." It's recruitment propaganda for his alma mater Howard University, which he loves with a passion unique to uncool dads. It's about literature: "Who is the Tolstoy of the Zulus?" asks Saul Bellow, because he's a dick, and "Tolstoy is the Tolstoy of the Zulus," wtf, responds Ralph Wiley.

But mostly he talks about bodies, and how much harder it is to keep them safe if they're black. You may already be aware of this, particularly if you're black, but you maybe haven't seen it described this forcefully and eloquently since James Baldwin's The Fire Next time. But each generation should have a definitive text about the state of racism. This is our generation's definitive text.