Jack Sullivan is a rookie reporter at the Messenger newspaper in Richmond, Virginia. When he's assigned to the local police beat, he never expects to uncover a network of crime amid the systemic racism enshrined in the city's Confederate history.
As the young journalist pulls at the threads of a story that spans from a record high in city homicides to interstate arms running, he is forced to confront the prejudices that color his young life and career. Sullivan realizes that he has never known a Black person well because he learned from other Whites - through remarks, looks, tones of voice, body language, and other cues - that Black people were not like Whites, that they were to be feared and shunned. He knows in the end that isn't true.
Strains of music have run through Sullivan's life since he was a kid. Throughout the book, he listens to jazz, blues, and rock songs, and recounts tales of memorable music shows he attended.
Inspired by the author's own reporting in the wake of the march by White supremacists in Charlottesville and the murder of George Floyd, Harmony in Black and White is an unflinching newsroom drama and an examination of the impact of race and implicit biases on our media, law enforcement, and the systems that govern them.