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.
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...
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.
All this time you were growing into words and feelings; my beautiful brown boy, who would soon come into the knowledge, who would soon comprehend the edicts of his galaxy, and all the extinction-level...
The sprawl, is the automobile, the noose
The old mantra—Either I can beat him or the police. I understood it all—the cable wires, the extension cords, the ritual switch. Black people love their children with a kind of obsession. You are all...
The facts of my native world, I came to understand that my country was a galaxy, and this galaxy stretched from the pandemonium of West Baltimore to the happy hunting grounds of Mr. Belvedere. I obses...
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.
Sometimes fail to walk the air
Race is the child of racism, not the father.
Not just because of the black people swept away but because I know that gentrification is but a more pleasing name for white supremacy, is the interest on enslavement, the interest on Jim Crow, the in...
Love could be soft and understanding; that, soft or hard, love was an act of heroism. And
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...
You can no more be black like I am black than I could be black like your grandfather was.
What 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
We live in a goal-oriented era. Our media vocabulary is full of hot takes, big ideas, and grand theories of everything. But some time ago I rejected magic in all its forms...In accepting both the chao...
We know what we are, that we walk like we are not long for this world, that this world has never longed for us.
We forgot that there were those who loved that old country as it was, who did not lament the divisions, but drew power from them. And so, we saw postcards with watermelons on the white house lawn. We...