Charles Blow knows this, did not just experience some kind of fake epiphany, and is well aware that this is the central theme of his own paper's bestseller list title, Between the World and Me by Ta-Nehisi Coates.
The whole point is an ideological denial of the existence of the soul in favor of the body, and the goal is to detach black Americans from Christianity in favor of Coates' own racial grievance atheism.
Wow! Does he know that one of the reasons slave proponents believed as they did was the assumption that blacks do not have souls. Now he wants to prove that!
Never mind that he says the same thing about others. Hit him over the head with this!