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What's good, y'all? This is Coatswitch from MPR. I'm Gene Demby.

And if you follow stories about how races lived in America,

there's a list of names that you've undoubtedly become familiar with.

Michael Brown, Sandra Bland, Freddie Gray, Eric Garner,

Tamir Rice, Traymon Martin. Those are the names of Black folks who ended up dead

after some confrontation with the police officer or an armed stranger.

And you also probably know the story of how police and Ferguson were targeting the Black folks

there for tickets and citations. Or you've heard the story of how folks in the struggling,

mostly Blacktown or Flint, Michigan saw their water turn toxic.

And there have been hashtags and discussions and protests.

And sometimes, violence, increasingly, we've seen some official inquiries,

if not prosecutions in the aftermath of this news. But let's back up a little bit.

What happens before there's so much more to these stories than what makes the headlines?

And the circumstances that led to those ultimate tragedies are decades in the making.

And that's the thrust of a new book by the Morehouse University Professor Mark Lamont Hill.

That book is called Nobody, Casualties of America's War on the Vulnerable,

from Ferguson to Flint and beyond. And the argument that Mark is making in this book

...