In The Beautiful Struggle, Ta-Nehisi Coates tells his own story of growing up as the son of a former Black Panther in West Baltimore in the 1980s and 90s. It was the era in which crack cocaine swallowed whole neighborhoods of Black men, while Black boys got shot over sneakers. Coates looked everywhere for identity-from middle school gangs, to Public Enemy, to the djembe, to waving the red, black, and green of a transcendent African mythology. He writes,...