I told you is what your grandparents tried to tell me: that this is your country, that this is your world, that this is your body, and you must find some way to live within the all of it. I tell you n...
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 didn’t always have things, but I had people—I always had people.
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 so very proud of you — your openness, your ambition, your aggression, your intelligence. My job, in the little time we have left together, is to match that intelligence with wisdom. Part of that...
Here is what I would like for you to know: In America, it is traditional to destroy the black body - it is heritage. Enslavement was not merely the antiseptic borrowing of labor - it is not so easy to...
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...
For realists, the true story of the Civil War illuminates the problem of ostensibly sober-minded compromise with powerful, and intractable, evil.
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...
Do you ever feel that same need? Your life is so very different from my own. The grandness of the world, the real world, the whole world, is a known thing for you. And you have no need of dispatches b...
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...
Never forget that we were enslaved in this country longer than we have been free. Never forget that for 250 years black people were born into chains-whole generations followed by more generations who...
People who believe themselves to be white are obsessed with the politics of personal exoneration. And the word racist, to them, conjures, if not a tobacco-spitting oaf, then something just as fantasti...
When it becomes clear that Good Negro Government might, in some way, empower actual Negroes over actual whites, then the fear sets in, the affirmative-action charges begin, and birtherism emerges. And...
To be a black male is to be always at war, and no flight to the county can save us, because even there we are met by the assupmtion of violence, by the specter of who we might turn on next.
This part of the Obama formula is the most troubling, and least thought out. This judgment emerges from my own biography. I am the product of black parents who encouraged me to read, of black teachers...
The truth of us was always that you were our ring.
The goal of all this is to delegitimize Obama’s presidency. If Obama is not truly American, then America has still never had a black president.
Once we were slaves to haramu-fal. Once we were breed by men solely to give our bodies to other men. We have seen how the woman becomes the enslaved. Let us now show them how the enslaved becomes a le...
In such revisions of history lay the roots of the noble Lost Cause—the belief that the South didn’t lose, so much as it was simply overwhelmed by superior numbers; that General Robert E. Lee was a con...