That would be great.”Whitehead has just finished a new book, which he describes as a crime novel set in Harlem. “The novel is inspired by the Dozier School for Boys, a century-old reform school in Marianna, Florida, that was shut down in 2011 and made headlines the following year when the bodies of over 50 boys were exhumed on the school’s grounds. Colson Whitehead: 'We invent all sorts of different reasons to hate people'Colson Whitehead: 'We invent all sorts of different reasons to hate people' “And I think a lot of us are trying to find our way back to sanity. For decades boys and men, who’d survived the brutality at Dozier—beatings, rapes, and torture—had spoken out about the horrors of the institution, hoping someone would listen, but until the exhumation few did.Whitehead came across the story of Dozier on Twitter in 2014—the same year the police officer Too often descriptions of state-sanctioned violence omit the name and title of the perpetrator, making any sense of accountability an afterthought at best. “It’s always there,” he says, wearily. It read: “The guilty escape punishment. Then there’s the pessimistic side, the cynical side [in Turner] that says no—this country is founded on genocide, murder, and slavery and it will always be that way. Sexual violence is widespread, too—perpetrated both by the guards against the boys, and the boys against one another—and yet the descriptions of this violence only goes as far as describing guards “taking them into closets and supply rooms” or that one of the boys “play[s] rough, then he takes them into the stall or whatever and gets on his knees.” This selective sparsity of detail can be read one of two ways: as an emotional limitation—territory into which Whitehead wasn’t willing or able to tread—or as an artistic decision to render the violence allusive and menacing, like the existence of the boogeyman.“There’s an economy to this [book] that was previously out of reach.… If I’d come to this story 15 years ago, it would’ve been this huge, sprawling book about the criminal-justice system and Jim Crow and Florida politics,” he says. But here we are, 12 weeks in, and we’re still figuring out the new reality. (Who else can swing so effortlessly between zombie fiction, … On Elwood’s second day there, Turner warns him, “You got to quit that eager-beaver shit, El.” Elwood doesn’t listen—and like all wide-eyed idealist who don’t see the step in front of them because they’re focused on the landing, he pays for it, learning quickly that moral right and wrong are of little object to those who enforce the law at Nickel.“Elwood and Turner represent two different parts of my personality,” Whitehead says. He was born in New York in 1969; he’d seen police violence. If I thought Donald Trump were to be re-elected again in November, I’d probably go insane. But, let’s see how long this can be sustained and what actually comes out of it. It’s ongoing and it will be ongoing for many years.” He does not sound that hopefulRereading both his recent novels, it was difficult not to see the police killings as part of a continuum of embedded, and often violently expressed, racial injustice that has defined America more than any other single issue. Like Cora, the escaped slave in “In the Dozier School, you had the actual abusers,” Whitehead continues, “but you also have a system wherein all those in positions of power looked the other way. He can even refuse to go.”Tellingly, the narrative unfolds against the backdrop of the southern civil rights protests of the early-to-mid-1960s, which seem almost impossibly distant to the two protagonists, Elwood and Turner, whose lives have been denuded of freedom and hope. “I didn’t want to do another heavy book,” he says. I’d rather finish the book than not.”In 2011, having published four very different novels, including his critically acclaimed debut, People do irrational things that, as a writer, you couldn’t really think up. His killer was “The last five days [we spoke after the first wave of protests] have been pretty extraordinary in terms of how wide and how big the protests have been,” he says. He tells me at one point: “But, you do have to remain hopeful and believe that things will get better or what’s the point of going on?”Despite his relatively cosseted background – private school, summers in Sag Harbour in the Hamptons – Whitehead too has inevitably experienced America’s casually racist policing at first hand, but passes it off as hardly worth talking about. Colson Whitehead’s two Pulitzer-winning novels explore America’s history of racial injustice. He laughs ruefully. It’s the matter-of-fact nature of the violence that makes it disturbingly real. And then there was the Trump administration, he says, with its concentration camps on the border.

That’s our dilemma as human beings: How do we reconcile the hopeful with our pessimistic side? How do you live with that knowledge? I'd never read anything by Colson (he's published five previous novels and two works of nonfiction and was a Pulitzer Prize finalist ), but everything I'd heard about the book—the way it shape-shifts and refracts time and history through the figure of one 16-year-old girl—made me eager to … In fact, I think we will continue to treat each other pretty horribly in the way I described in He tells me that, throughout the writing of the book, he would open a file on his computer every morning and see a note he had posted there when he began.

“In terms of being picked up by police, everyone who is black has had that experience to the point where it’s not even that interesting. How do we reconcile disappointments with the small daily times that make up our lives? Instead, they let them stay in their jobs even though people were getting killed or disappeared.”The parallels with contemporary American governance are telling; if anything, we seem to be travelling backwards under Trump.