Ta-Nehisi Coates, the author and thinker who has served as the avatar of the progressive racial movement since he began blogging at the Atlantic during the Obama administration, has reemerged after a hiatus spent writing comic books. His new work of nonfiction, The Message , harkens back to his 2015 bestseller, Between the World and Me , as both books discuss social politics and history through a highly personal lens. Coates’s earlier work earned him a MacArthur “genius grant,” literary