The night of May 25, 2020 changed America. George Floyd, a 43-year-old black man, was killed during an arrest in Minneapolis when a white cop suffocated him. The video of that night's events went viral, sparking the largest protests in the nation's history and the sort of social unrest not seen since the sixties. While Floyd's death was certainly the catalyst, (heightened by the fact that it occurred during a pandemic whose victims were disproportionately of color) it was in truth the fuse that lit a powder keg that has been filling since America's promising but perilous beginning. Everywhere one turned, there was the claim that this might finally be the reckoning that the nation had been promising to undertake for decades. Michael Eric Dyson's timely new audiobook grapples with the cultural and social forces that have shaped the nation in the brutal crucible of race.