In these impassioned, powerful essays, an award-winning journalist deals forthrightly with what it means to be black in Trump's America.

South Carolina–based journalist Issac J. Bailey reflects on a wide range of complex, divisive topics—from police brutality and Confederate symbols to respectability politics and white discomfort—which have taken on a fresh urgency with the protest movement sparked by George Floyd's killing. Bailey has been honing his views on these issues for the past quarter of a century in his professional and private life, which included an eighteen-year stint as a member of a mostly white Evangelical Christian church.

Why Didn't We Riot? speaks to and for the millions of black and brown people throughout the United States who were effectively pushed back to the back of the bus in the Trump era by a media that prioritized the concerns and feelings of the white working class and an administration that...