What both visions share is a sense that black culture in its present form is bastardized and pathological. What they also share is a foundation in myth. Black people are not the descendants of kings....
To survive the neighborhoods and shield my body, I learned another language consisting of a basic complement of head nods and handshakes. I memorized a list of prohibited blocks.
This is how we lose our softness. This is how they steal our right to smile. No one told those little white children, with their tricycles, to be twice as good. I imagined their parents telling them t...
These were the injuries, among any others, that Sologon- the so-called Buffalo Woman- was made to carry. But every dart endured, every torture tolerated, tempered her. Sologon grew strong. Ruthless. H...
The illusion of wage and employment progress among African American males was made possible only through the erasure of the most vulnerable among them from the official statistics.
The Negro Family is a flawed work in part because it is a fundamentally sexist document that promotes the importance not just of family but of patriarchy, arguing that black men should be empowered at...
Never forget that we were enslaved in this country longer than we have been free.
Just play this out as a thought experiment, he said. Imagine if you had genuine, high-quality early-childhood education for every child, and suddenly every black child in America—but also every poor w...
In those years, hip-hop saved my life. I was still half alien to the people around me. I loved them, mostly because I'd realized that there was no other choice. Hip-hop gave me a common language, but...
I was a curious boy, but the schools were not concerned with curiosity. They were concerned with compliance.
I think of your grandmother calling me and noting how you were growing tall and would one day try to test me. And I said to her that I would regard that day, should it come, as the total failure of fa...
I do not think your problem is an old philosopher. I do not think your problem is the renegade Dora Milaje. Your problem, T'Challa... is the people.
I come back to the motherland and this is the thanks I get? Still better than the knife-wielding thugs I found in Harlem, Misty. You do remember, don't you? I resent the term thug. That's 'cause you a...
I came to see the streets and the schools as arms of the same beast. One enjoyed the official power of the state while the other enjoyed its implicit sanction. But fear and violence were the weaponry...
I am wounded. I am marked by old codes, which shielded me in one world and then chained me in the next.
Her country crumbling to dust, and with broken men all around, Queen Shuri went off to her doom. I could have gone with her. But someone had to fight and someone had to live. And after we parted, I wo...
Each time a police officer engages us, death, injury, maiming is possible. It is not enough to say that this is true of anyone or more true of criminals. The moment the officers began their pursuit of...
But the Levittowns were, with Levitt's willing acquiescence, segregated throughout their early years. Daisy and Bill Myers, the first black family to move into Levittown, Pennsylvania, were greeted wi...
But Washington did this in the mid-1980s in segregated Chicago, and he had not had the luxury, as Obama did, of becoming black with minimal trauma.
Anyone can make a baby, but it takes a man to be a father.' This is what they had told me all my life. It was the language of survival, a myth that helped us cope with the human sacrifice that finds u...