My Daddy's Blues: James Baldwin and the Inheritance of White Supremacy is Frank A. Thomas's deeply personal exploration of his life, his father's influence on his life, given his father’s death on the day of the Capitol Insurrection in 2021, and the Insurrection’s obvious overtones and declaration of white supremacy in America. Thomas identifies that both he and his father inherited white supremacy and utilizes the writings and insights of James Baldwin as a conversation partner whose work offers language and insight for examining the inheritance of white supremacy and the ways that inheritance reaches across generations.

Thomas invites readers into a personal and searching conversation about what it means to love America, if one can love it at all, inheritance itself, and the inheritance of white supremacy, that is, what we received, what we come to understand differently over time and behave accordingly, what it means to take control of one’s own destiny and future, and position oneself to pass on an inheritance to the next generation.

Part memoir, part spiritual reflection, part social commentary, and part critical engagement with one of America’s most influential and prolific writers in Baldwin, My Daddy’s Blues brings together family, memory, race, spiritual practices and the ongoing work of understanding the legacy of what is passed from one generation to the next and what inheritance one consciously passes to the next generation.