Ta Nehisi Coates is both a darling of the country’s Black intelligentsia (John McWhorter being a notable exception) and America’s cultural elite of all races. The New York Times’ A.O. Scott, for instance, has lavished praise on Coates’s writing calling it “essential, like water or air.” When you are held in such esteem, an attendant luxury is that your work doesn’t automatically face much of the scrutiny those less exalted must endure. For all his acclaim, Coates often avoids facts that might complicate his highly praised stories, and in the process misleads readers with oversimplified conclusions. Is that really what great writers do?

Two notable examples from his recent works serve to illustrate. In his National Book Award-winning 2015 memoir, Between the World and Me, especially popular on high school and college reading lists, Coates recounted the death of a Howard University classmate at the hands of an undercover officer. The classmate, Prince Jones, was portrayed as a close friend of Coates in some reader study guides and some critiques, yet from Coates’s account it is unclear whether the two were anything more than casual acquaintances or whether they had ever even spoken to each other. A trivial point, but it makes a difference in the retelling.

Jones was killed during a late-night encounter in a case of mistaken identity outside the District of Columbia. The officer and Jones were the only two present at the shooting, and the officer fired 16 shots, five of which struck Jones in the back. It looked especially suspicious because the officer had been reprimanded for a previous cover-up and was never criminally charged for Jones’s death. A civil suit was filed against the officer and the department, with several million dollars being awarded to the family.

The story Coates tells is one of a man’s murder by a racist justice system. But there are problems with this portrayal that Coates never explores, not the least of which is that the officer was Black (like Jones and Coates, he had attended Howard). This might obviously complicate the racial murder narrative, although the author mentions this only in passing.