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Notes -
Losing the Race: Self-Sabotage in Black America by John McWhorter was pretty controversial when it was released twenty years ago. McWhorter is a Columbia linguist and is himself black. Glenn Loury's Anatomy of Racial Inequality also bears mentioning.
Neither of these are brother-on-the-street accounts, but I'd say are closer to such than what you'd find by Thomas Sowell.
I'd argue Baldwin's The Fire Next Time is now dated, but it's worth reading if only because Baldwin was such a compelling writer and that book is widely revered/reviled. In a similar (i.e. dated) vein, although it's been 30 years since I read it, I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings was Maya Angelou's best (in my view only really good) work. It's really worth reading, though I don't understand the hype around anything else she ever wrote.
I like Coleman Hughes but it's sometimes like reading the perspective of a white guy who grew up black, and in that sense I suspect removed from a more typical experience.
I grew up in the deep south where black folks were a large part of my youth, and then lived in Africa three years where I was the only white dude for 200km. Still half my life has been in Japan, where I'm again a minority but there aren't a lot of black people, so I feel pretty out of touch in how the racial climate particularly in the US has changed. It certainly seems worse than it used to be but who knows from this distance.
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