Poetry was the processing of my thoughts until the slag of justification fell away and I was left with the cold steel truths of life.
Racial attitudes had a significantly greater impact on health care opinions when framed as part of President Obama’s plan than they had when the exact same policies were attributed to President Clinto...
Racism—the need to ascribe bone-deep features to people and then humiliate, reduce, and destroy them—inevitably follows from this inalterable condition. In
Regarder cette réalité en face est douloureux. Mais notre lexique tout entier - relations interraciales, discriminations, justice raciale, profilage racial, privilège blanc et même suprématie blanche...
Schools did not reveal truths, they concealed them. Perhaps they must be burned away so that the heart of this thing might be known.
So you must wake up every morning knowing that no promise is unbreakable, least of all the promise of waking up at all.
Some days I would take the train into Manhattan. There was so much money everywhere, money flowing out of bistros and cafes, money pushing the people at incredible speeds, up the wide avenues, money d...
The Dream is the same habit that endangers the planet, the same habit that sees our bodies stowed away in prisons and ghettos. I saw these ghettos driving back from Dr. Jones’s home. They were the sam...
The Dreamers will have to learn to struggle themselves, to understand that the field for their Dream, the stage where they have painted themselves white, is the deathbed of us all. The Dream is the sa...
The black public intellectual need not be wise, but he had better have answers. There were dissenters in the tradition. There was Derrick Bell, for instance. But mostly I felt the expectation that if...
The kind of trenchant racism to which black people have persistently been subjected can never be defeated by making its victims more respectable.
But however it appears, the power of domination and exclusion is central to the belief in being white, and without it, white people would cease to exist for want of reasons.
How do I live free in this black body? It is a profound question because America understands itself as God’s handiwork, but the black body is the clearest evidence that America is the work of men.
There are people whom we do not fully know, and yet they live in a warm place within us, and when they are plundered, when they lose their bodies and the dark energy disperses, that place becomes a wo...
But Washington did this in the mid-1980s in segregated Chicago, and he had not had the luxury, as Obama did, of becoming black with minimal trauma.
We could not get out. The ground we walked was trip-wired. The air we breathed was toxic. The water stunted our growth. We could not get out.
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...
Toute ma vie, j'avais entendu des gens dire à leurs filles et leurs garçons noirs d'être deux fois meilleurs, ce qui revient à dire accepte d'avoir deux fois moins. Ces paroles étaient prononcées sur...
They were the children of the Jackie Robinson elite, whose parents rose up out of the ghettos, and the sharecropping fields, went out into the suburbs, only to find that they carried the mark with the...
This need to be always on guard was an unmeasured expenditure of energy, the slow siphoning of the essence.
Showing 301 to 320 of 928 results