Earlier this week, John Paul Rollert wrote for us a comparison of the writings of Ta-Nehisi Coates and Barack Obama, who have both “made race and empathy central to their writing, but their conclusions point in radically different directions.” A key passage: When [Obama] describes the racist episodes of his youth, it is not merely that they lack the “visceral” menace of Coates’s experience—he revealingly calls them a “ledger of slights”—they seem only to scratch him, they never scar.