To yell black-on-black crime is to shoot a man and then shame him for bleeding. And
This story began, as all writing must, in failure.
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...
This need to be always on guard was an unmeasured expenditure of energy, the slow siphoning of the essence.
The writer, and that was what I was becoming, must be wary of every Dream and every nation, even his own nation. Perhaps his own nation more than any other, precisely because it was his own. I
The warlords of history are still kicking our heads in, and no one, not our fathers, not our Gods, is coming to save us.
The tightly intertwined stories of the white working class and black Americans go back to the prehistory of the United States—and the use of one as a cudgel to silence the claims of the other goes bac...
The girl from Chicago understood this too, and she understood something more—that all are not equally robbed of their bodies, that the bodies of women are set out for pillage in ways I could never tru...
The Dreamers accept this as the cost of doing business, accept our bodies as currency, because it is their tradition. As slaves we were this country’s first windfall, the down payment on its freedom....
She alluded to 12 Years a Slave. There he was, she said, speaking of Solomon Northup. He had means. He had a family. He was living like a human being. And one racist act took him back. And the same is...
Schools did not reveal truths, they concealed them. Perhaps they must be burned away so that the heart of this thing might be known.
Poetry aims for an economy of truth--loose and useless words must be discarded, and I found that these loose and useless words were not separate from loose and useless thoughts. Poetry was not simply...
Our world is physical. Learn to play defense—ignore the head and keep your eyes on the body.
Once when I was a tree, African sun woke me up green at dawn. African wind combed the branches of my hair. African rain washed my limbs. Once when I was a tree, flesh came and worshipped my roots. Fle...
Not being violent enough could cost me my body. Being too violent could cost me my body. We could not get out.
Never forget that for 250 years black people were born into chains—whole generations followed by more generations who knew nothing but chains. You must struggle to truly remember this past in all its...
It is not a mistake that Gone with the Wind is one of the most read works of American literature or that The Birth of a Nation is the most revered touchstone of all American film. Both emerge from a n...
In my survey course of America, I’d seen portraits of the Irish drawn in the same ravenous, lustful, and simian way. Perhaps there had been other bodies, mocked, terrorized, and insecure. Perhaps the...
I was a capable boy, intelligent, well-liked, but powerfully afraid. And I felt, vaguely, wordlessly, that for a child to be marked off for such a life, to be forced to live in fear was a great injust...
I remember sitting in my seventh-grade French class and not having any idea why I was there. I did not know any French people, and nothing around me suggested I ever would. France was a rock rotating...