It is the flight from us that sent them sprawling into the subdivided woods. And the method of transport through these new subdivisions, across the sprawl, is the automobile, the noose around the neck...
I gave them to you not because I thought they would curb your behavior—they certainly did not curb mine—but because these were the earliest acts of interrogation, of drawing myself into consciousness.
I am sorry that I cannot make it okay. I am sorry that I cannot save you - but not that sorry. Part of me thinks that your very vulnerability brings you closer to the meaning of life, just as for othe...
Here is what I would like 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 g...
He laughed, then continued, The reason I say that is because those are the times where sometimes you feel actually a little bit hurt. Because you feel like saying to these folks, ‘[Don’t] you think if...
Having preserved the Union and saved white workers from competing with slave labor, the North could magnanimously acquiesce to such Confederate meretriciousness and the concomitant irrelevance of the...
Fail to comprehend the streets and you gave up your body now. But fail to comprehend the schools and you gave up your body later.
Every February my classmates and I were herded into assemblies for a ritual review of the Civil Rights Movement. Our teachers urged us toward the example of freedom marchers, Freedom Riders, and Freed...
Can fearsome Ayo, who is herself a warrior, not understand their suffering? Can she not see what fire and inundation have done to the Wakadan heart? Tetu, I am a . I saw more suffering, more of the hu...
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 families don’t exist independent of their environment.
As slaves we were this country’s first windfall, the down payment on its freedom. After the ruin and liberation of the Civil War came Redemption for the unrepentant South and Reunion, and our bodies b...
And it occurred to me then thatyou would not escape, thatthere were awful menwho’d laid plans for you,and I could not stop them.Prince Jones was thesuperlative of all my fears.And if he, good Christia...
Americans believe in the reality of race as a defined, indubitable feature of the natural world.
There are African-American families around this country - a large, large number of African-American families - that operate out of complete fear that their kids are going to be taken from them and wil...
What did I know of loving anything, beyond a longing, beyond being biased in one woman's direction.
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.
That stunted imagination is something I owe to my chains.
You must never look away from this. You must always remember that the sociology, the history, the economics, the graphs, the charts, the regressions all land, with great violence, upon the body.
You have been cast into a race in which the wind is always at your face and the hounds are always at your heels. And to varying degrees this is true of all life. The difference is that you do not have...