On Monday, Ta-Nehisi Coates published an essay in The Atlantic entitled “The Black Family in the Age of Mass Incarceration.” It’s a remarkable piece, both in terms of its scope and its depth. Like Coates’s recent essay on reparations, this one feels urgent and destined to explode false narratives about race, crime and America’s justice system.

Focusing on the plight of the black family, Coates analyzes a host of interrelated problems: crime, the Drug War, the perverse prison-industrial complex, and the legacy of America’s racist and kleptocratic past. Coates covers a lot of ground, and I can’t possibly do justice to his argument here, but there are a few things worth highlighting.

The public intellectual invites us to grapple with the past and its relation to our unequal present