You can no more be black like I am black than I could be black like your grandfather was.
Who is the Tolstoy of the Zulus? Bellow quipped. Tolstoy was white, and so Tolstoy mattered, like everything else that was white mattered.
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 meant well. We tried our best. Good intention is a hall pass through history, a sleeping pill that ensures the Dream.
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...
We are warriors. And yet a moment ago, you were women. Mother, I swear it, I am doing all I can. And I am sorry, daughter, but you are going to have to do more.
This need to be always on guard was an unmeasured expenditure of energy, the slow siphoning of the essence.
There is no them without you, and without the right to break you they must necessarily fall from the mountain, lose their divinity, and tumble out of the Dream. And then they would have to determine h...
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...
So you must wake up every morning knowing that no promise is unbreakable, least of all the promise of waking up at all.
So there was love, and specifically the desire to give to someone who had given so much to me. But too there was a need to liberate myself from old models. I did not want a good woman behind me, besid...
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.
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...
La rue fait de chaque journée une suite de questions piège, et chaque réponse incorrecte peut provoquer une raclée, une balle dans la peau, une grossesse non désirée. Personne n'en sort indemne. Pourt...