An Essay for Ezra: Racial Terror in America
Grant Farred
University of Minnesota Press
An Essay for Ezra is a critique of terror that begins but by no means ends with the presidency of Donald J. Trump. A father addresses his son and a boy shares his observations in a dynamic dialogistic exchange that is a commentary of and for its time, taking the measure of racial terror and of white supremacy both in our moment and as a historical phenomenon. Framed through the experiences of the author’s biracial son, An Essay for Ezra is intensely personal while also powerfully universal. Drawing on the social and political thought of James Baldwin and Martin Luther King, the ideas of Jameson, Barthes, Derrida, Adorno and Kant, and the comedy of Dave Chappelle, Farred examines the temptation and the perils of essentialism and the need to discriminate—to engage the black mind as much as the black body.