For most of his early life, Coates believed in the idea of “cosmic justice, that good acts were rewarded and bad deeds punished” (110). His parents’ unsympathetic responses to Coates’s being bullied on the streets of Baltimore and his later reading of history eventually convinced him that it was always better to be the aggressor than to be prey—that “[m]ight really does make right” (110). American history, with its celebration of immoral but strong figures like Andrew Jackson, forced Coates to see that the wider culture was mostly not interested in justice.

Coates found a counternarrative to “might makes right” in the defiance of Black American figures like Celia and Margaret Garner—enslaved women who murdered rather than submit to their masters. Coates identifies them as foremothers who taught him that to be free was to be defiant and always to hold the White supremacists to account for their theft and violence. When Chuck D rapped with “total disrespect and ill regard for America’s hallowed heroes and insisted that the pop culture of plunderers be treated as the theft it was” (112), Coates heard a more modern form of this ethos.

Coates calls this attitude “black atheism.