Just before Donald Trump tweeted that the impeachment investigation was equivalent to a lynching, I had the opportunity to hear Ta Nehisi Coates, National Book Award winner and one of America's leading essayists on the topic of race in America.

Most people might recognize his work through the movie "The Black Panther" that was based off a Marvel comic book series he wrote imagining an Africa never seized by people who traded in human lives, or his Atlantic essay titled "The Case for Repatriations", or his book "Between the World and Me," which Toni Morrison called "required reading." Coates was in Portland to speak about his first novel, "Water Dancer." He describes his book as part historical fiction, part magic realism and entirely a story meant to empower us to be more than the sum of our evil.