Busted in New York and Other Essays

A collection of essays that blend the personal and the social, from the celebrated literary critic and novelist In these twenty-five essays, Darryl Pinckney has given us a view of our recent racial history that blends the social and the personal and wonders how we arrived at our current moment. Pinckney reminds us that ?white supremacy isnt back; it never went away.? It is this impulse to see historically that is at the core of Busted in New York and Other Essays , which traces the lineage of black intellectual history from Booker T. Washington through the Harlem Renaissance, to the Black Panther Party and the turbulent sixties, to todays Afro-pessimists, and celebrated and neglected thinkers in between. These are capacious essays whose topics range from the grassroots of protest in Ferguson, Missouri, to the eighteenth-century Guadeloupian composer Joseph Bologne, from an unsparing portrait of Louis Farrakhan to the enduring legacy of James Baldwin, the unexpected story of black people experiencing Russia, Barry Jenkinss Moonlight , and the painter Kara Walker. The essays themselves are a kind of record, many of them written in real-time, as Pinckney witnesses the Million Man Marc