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The book includes two essays that were written in the 1960s during a time of segregation between White and Black Americans.

The first essay is a letter to Baldwin’s nephew, where he compares his nephew to the men in their family including Baldwin’s brother and father. He tells his nephew about America’s ability to destroy Black men and challenges his nephew to convert his anger due to mistreatment as a Black man into having a passionate and broad outlook on the Negro experience.

The second essay addresses the detriment of Christianity on the Black community and how Baldwin’s journey of being a teen pastor to completely pulling away from the church because it felt like a repression of his full experience of humanity. He then recounts his dinner with Elijah Muhammad where Muhammad educated Baldwin on the Nation of Islam in hopes to get him to join that movement. In this section Baldwin describes how Black Muslims have made a “black god” to avoid the oppression of a “white god” that Christianity has established within the Black community. In July 2015 Ta-Nehisi Coates released an article on The Atlantic as modernized version of Baldwin’s letter to his nephew called “Letter to My Son,” and later released an entire book called Between the World and Me talking about the current state of the Black experience in America.