When a South Carolina school board met with outraged parents to discuss an award-winning book by author Ta-Nehisi Coates that was banned from a classroom syllabus, they didn't expect to meet face to face with Coates himself.

But footage shows Coates — whose nonfiction memoir, Between the World and Me, was removed from an AP course at Chapin High School in the Lexington-Richmond district after its topic of racism made a couple of white students feel uncomfortable — sitting in solidarity among the parents who supported his book and right next to the teacher who had assigned the book. — Read the rest

I have been frequently awed by Ta-Nehisi Coates's thoughtful observations on politics and race in America. But I'll be honest: I was somewhat disappointed by his first run of Black Panther comics. It felt, to me, more like a Coates essay accompanied by some action sequences. — Read the rest

It's been five years since Ta-Nehisi Coates's groundbreaking The Case for Reparations ran in The Atlantic; yesterday, Coates appeared before Congress to celebrate Juneteenth with a barn-burning statement that starts as a response to Mitch McConnell's dismissal of racial injustice in America, but quickly becomes more than that — a Coatesian masterclass in understanding race, America, history and the present moment.

Author and journalist Ta-Nehisi Coates was speaking at a public event recently and was asked by a student if it is OK for white hip-hop fans to rap along to songs with the n-word in them. His answer is both humorous and illuminating. — Read the rest

Dave Maass writes, "In the 1890s, a tobacco company included collectors cards featuring 'American Editors' in its cigarette packs. In all, they were 49 white dudes and one woman, and the only diversity was in their beards and mustaches."

Ta-Nehisi Coates's 17,000-word history of the Obama presidency in the Atlantic is called "My President Was Black," but it's about the very special kind of blackness that Obama embodied — not because whites saw the biracial politician differently, but because Obama's extraordinarily supportive white family and unique boyhood in Hawai'i spared him the racial trauma visited on other young black people in America.

When ex-CIA agent Tom King teamed up with a group of extremely talented writers to reboot Marvel's "Vision" in 2015, he had a lot of material to work with -- the character had begun as a kind of super-android in the 1940s and had been reincarnated many times, through many twists and turns: what King & Co did with Vision both incorporated and transcended all that backstory, in an astounding tale that Ta-Nehisi Coates called "the best comic going right now." With the whole run collected in two volumes, there's never been a better time to see just how far comic storytelling can go.

Ta-Nehisi Coates, Macarthur-winning author of the outstanding Between the World and Me, was widely criticized when he condemned Bernie Sanders for saying that reparations for slavery were not a practical political goal (Coates won many prizes and gained much recognition for a superb essay called The Case for Reparations).

Between the World and Me is the memoir of Ta-Nehisi Coates -- certified genius and author of many seminal essays on race in America. It is a work of rage and beauty, and it should be the very next thing you read.

The awards — whose selection process is a closely guarded secret — come with $500,000 over five years.

2016 is going to be a big year for Black Panther. Not only will the first black superhero finally make his way to the silver screen for the first time in Captain America: Civil War, but Marvel Comics just announced a surprising but welcome name for the new writer of the Black Panther comic: Ta-Nehisi Coates. — Read the rest

PEN America published a report Tuesday charting the accelerating phenomenon of book bans across the U.S., especially in schools and the legislatures of Republican-led states. Conservatives claim books are used to indoctrinate children into communism, homosexuality, critical race theory and all the other good stuff, and want them gone. — Read the rest

On this Juneteenth, I thought I'd share two things I've just learned:

1. It's not ok to use the word "slave." It's dehumanizing. We should use "enslaved" instead. Watch the video with Ta-Nehisi Coates and Oprah to understand why better.

2. — Read the rest

Trump Did Not Pick HUD Secretary for Smarts, Nope

Wildstorm started life as an independent, creator-owned comics universe of enormous verve and originality; following its acquisition by comics behemoth DC in 1998, it grew moribund, leading to its shuttering in 2010. Now it's back, in a revival helmed by Warren "Transmetropolitan" Ellis, who has reimagined the complex geopolitics of this paranoid superspy/shadow government/black ops world into a brutally fast-paced, dynamic tale that's full of real bad guys and ambiguous good guys who may or may not be trustworthy. The first six issues are collected in The Wild Storm Vol. 1, out this week.

Ta-Nehisi Coates (previously) is in characteristically amazing form with his new essay in the Atlantic, "The First White President," in which he posits that Donald Trump is "the first president whose entire political existence hinges on the fact of a black president" — the first president elected by appealing to white supremacy to the exclusion of everything else.

"No President" is an unsigned editorial in N+1, and is, along with Ta-Nehisi Coates's My President Was Black, the best postmortem on the events of November 8 yet published: it begins with the door-to-door canvas of voters in the runup to the election and the strange ideological contradictions on display on America's doorsteps, reflects on the questions of gender and Clinton's election outcomes, and moves on to a realistic, but firm and inspiring, call for resistance in the years to come.

Here's this year's complete Boing Boing Gift Guide: more than a hundred great ideas for prezzies: technology, toys, books and more. Scroll down and buy things, mutants! Many of the items use Amazon Affiliate links that help us make ends meet at Boing Boing, the world's greatest neurozine. — Read the rest

When we got to rounding up our favorite books for our annual Gift Guide, we found that there were simply too many this time to throw in the Christmas/Kwanzaa/Hanukah/Yule/Solstice/Nonspecific Winter Celebration/New Year/Chalica hopper along with the tech and toys.

It's almost as if 2016 made the traditional way of learning more about our world — and of sharing dreams of other worlds — somehow more enticing. — Read the rest

Vertigo has tapped Cecil Castellucci (previously) and Marley Zarcone to reboot Shade, a Steve Ditko character last rebooted as a weird 1990s comic book about a transdimensional alien shape-shifter poet who used a "madness vest" in his quest to stem the tide of insanity leaking from Earth into his dimension; in Castellucci's capable hands, the new Shade is a fugitive who steals the madness vest in her escape to Earth and finds herself in the body of a Megan Boyer, a comatose mean girl who was about to have the plug pulled on her.