Raised to believe in treating every person of every color as an individual, Clifford Thompson decided as a young man that America, despite its history of racial oppression, was his home as much as anyone else’s.

But as a middle-aged, happily married father of biracial children, he found himself questioning some of his most deeply held convictions when Donald Trump’s ascension to the presidency was accompanied by a rise in white nationalism.

In a discussion of his new book What It Is: Race, Family, and One Thinking Black Man’s Blues, Thompson discusses his interviews with a small but varied group of Americans from whom he heard sharply divergent opinions about what is happening in the country and how those views shaped his own.