Five years later, 750,000 Americans were dead. But the fact that such carnage had been wreaked for a cause that Ulysses S. Grant called one of the worst for which a people ever fought, and one for whi...
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.
Before the president spoke, George Zimmerman was arguably the most reviled man in America. After the president spoke, Zimmerman became the patron saint of those who believe that an apt history of raci...
From the day we touched these stolen shores, he'd explain to anyone who'd listen, they infected our minds. They deployed their phrenologists, their backward Darwinists, and forged a false Knowledge to...
The Dreamers are quoting Martin Luther King and exulting nonviolence for the weak and the biggest guns for the strong.
Racism is a visceral experience, that it dislodges brains, blocks airways, rips muscle, extracts organs, cracks bones, breaks teeth. You must never look away from this.
It was slavery that allowed American democracy to exist in the first place. It was slavery that gifted much of the South with a working class that lived outside of all protections and could be driven,...
You can’t refuse to meet because that might compromise the purity of your position, he said. The value of social movements and activism is to get you at the table, get you in the room, and then start...
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.
Time would come when gold would outweigh blood. But this was still Virginia of old, where a dubious God held that those who would offer a man for sale were somehow more honorable than those who effect...
These are all fine and applicable, but they understate the task and allow the citizens of this country to pretend that there is real distance between their own attitudes and those of the ones appointe...
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 fact of history is that black people have not -- probably no people have ever -- liberated themselves strictly through their own efforts. In every great change in the lives of African Americans we...
The black people in these films seemed to love the worst things in life—love the dogs that rent their children apart, the tear gas that clawed at their lungs, the fire-hoses that tore off their clothe...
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...
Love of country, like all other forms of love, requires that you tell those you care about not simply what they want to hear but what they need to hear.
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...
Indeed, they felt it their duty to disabuse me of my weaponized history. They had seen so many Malcolmites before and were ready. Their method was rough and direct. Did black skin really convey nobili...
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...