Ta-Nehisi Coates originally set off to write a book about writing, in the tradition of Orwell?s classic Politics and the English Language, but found himself grappling with deeper questions about how our stories?our reporting and imaginative narratives and mythmaking?expose and distort our realities.

The first of the book?s three intertwining essays is set in Dakar, Senegal. Despite being raised as a strict Afrocentrist, Coates had never set foot on the African continent until now. He roams the ?steampunk? city of ?old traditions and new machinery,? but everywhere he goes he feels as if he?s in two places at once: a modern city in Senegal and a mythic kingdom in his mind. Finally he travels to the slave castles off the coast and has his own reckoning with the legacy of the Afrocentric dream.

He takes readers along with him to Columbia, South Carolina, where he meets an educator whose job is threatened for teaching one of Coates?s own books. There he discovers a community of mostly white supporters who were transformed by the ?racial reckoning? of 2020. But he also explores the backlash to this reckoning and the deeper myths of the community?a capital of the confederacy with statues of segregationists looming over its public squares.