I read about Queen Nzinga who ruled in Central Africa in the 16th century resisting the Portuguese. I read about her negotiating with the Dutch. When the Dutch Ambassador tried to humiliate her by ref...
I devoured the books because they were the rays of light peeking out from the doorframe, and perhaps past that door there was another world,
I could not retreat, as did so many, into the church and its mysteries. My parents rejected all dogmas. We spurned the holidays marketed by the people who wanted to be white. We would not stand for th...
I came up in segregated West Baltimore. I understood black as a culture—as Etta James, jumping the broom, the Electric Slide. I understood the history and the politics, the debilitating effects of rac...
I appear before you this evening as a thief and a robber, Frederick Douglass told his audiences. I stole this head, these limbs, this body from my master, and ran off with them.
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.
Hmm... 'our' country? I have not spoken in this manner in some years. But Wakanda is my home. Wakanda is our home.
For African Americans, war commenced not in 1861, but in 1661, when the Virginia Colony began passing America's first black codes, the charter documents of a slave society that rendered blacks a perma...
Educators spoke of personal responsibility in a country authored and sustained by a criminal irresponsibility. The point of this language of intention and personal responsibility is broad exoneration....
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 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.
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...
What did I know of loving anything, beyond a longing, beyond being biased in one woman's direction.
Was made for the library, not the classroom. The classroom was a jail of other people’s interests. The library was open, unending, free.
Traveling as a pointless luxury, like blowing the rent check on a pink suit.
So that America might justify itself, the story of a black body’s destruction must always begin with his or her error, real or imagined—with Eric Garner’s anger, with Trayvon Martin’s mythical words (...
Rouse them to the facts of what their need to be white, to talk like they are white, to think that they are white, which is to think that they are beyond the design flaws of humanity, has done to the...
Ours. By then I’d read Chancellor Williams, J. A. Rogers, and John Jackson—writers central to the canon of our new noble history. From them I knew that Mansa Musa of Mali was black, and Shabaka of Egy...
You cannot forget how much they took from us and how they transfigured our very bodies into sugar, tobacco, cotton, and gold.
What any institution, or its agents, intend for you is secondary. Our world is physical. Learn to play defense—ignore the head and keep your eyes on the body. Very few Americans will directly proclaim...