“Charles Blow’s uncommonly specific and clear remedy for overcoming racial injustice in America is provocative, intriguing, innovative, and insightful. You won’t read another contemporary book on race as powerful as this bold work by one of the nation’s most compelling writers.”—Bryan Stevenson, founder and executive director of the Equal Justice Initiative and author of Just Mercy

Race, as we have come to understand it, is a fiction; but, racism, as we have come to live it, is a fact. The point here is not to impose a new racial hierarchy, but to remove an existing one. After centuries of waiting for white majorities to overturn white supremacy, it seems to me that it has fallen to Black people to do it themselves.

Acclaimed columnist and author Charles Blow never wanted to write a “race book.” But as violence against Black people—both physical and psychological—seemed only to increase in recent years, he felt compelled to write a new story for Black Americans. In this groundbreaking manifesto, he offers a succinct, counterintuitive, and impassioned corrective to the myths that have for too long governed our thinking about race and geography in America.

So what will it take to make lasting change when small steps have so frequently failed? It’s going to take an unprecedented shift in power. The Devil You Know proposes nothing short of the most audacious power play by Black people in the history of this country.