Your forthcoming book, “Tears We Cannot Stop,” is subtitled “A Sermon to White America.” Which part of white America do you envision reading it? I envision the audience to be that ocean of white folk I encounter who are deeply empathetic to the struggles of minorities — they are the ones who ask me, “What can I do, as a white person?” This is my attempt to address them in the most useful and, hopefully, edifying manner.

What’s your strategy for getting through to the white people who may not be particularly sympathetic? What I’ve seen under the wonderful presidency of Barack Obama is the tendency to not tell white people the truth, for obvious reasons — they don’t vote for you. But I’m not a politician. I don’t have that power or influence, but what I do wield is a different kind of bully pulpit. We have to have enough belief in white people to tell them the truth. They are grown!

There are a lot of areas within race relations that seem like less of a conversation and more of an attempt to prove to white people that these issues — police brutality, for instance — are a real and present danger. I open this book with horror stories about my engagement with the police. These are the stories that have shaped me, that join me to the mass of people who, regardless of our station in life, regardless of educational attainment and achievement, have felt this. The president of the United States has these stories, the former attorney general has these stories and a prominent black intellectual like me has these stories. The reality is that this is part and parcel of what it means to be black in America, and I wanted to spend time talking and thinking about it from a number of different perspectives to show white brothers and sisters that we aren’t making this up. This is not fabricated.