If you’re black, you were born in jail, Malcolm said. And I felt the truth of this in the blocks I had to avoid, in the times of day when I must not be caught walking home from school, in my lack of c...
I had not been prepared for the simple charm of watching someone you love grow.
I could haveyou arrested! Which is tosay: I could take yourbody.
He went back to Baldwin, who posed the great paradox that would haunt him to the end: Who among us would integrate into a burning house?
Black life is cheap, but in America black bodies are a natural resource of incomparable value.
Was made for the library, not the classroom. The classroom was a jail of other people’s interests. The library was open, unending, free.
This is your country, that this is your world, that this is your body, and you must find a way to live within the all of it
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...
Specious
You cannot forget how much they took from us and how they transfigured our very bodies into sugar, tobacco, cotton, and gold.
What I wanted was to put as much distance between you and that blinding fear as possible.
Tolstoy is the Tolstoy of the Zulus,' wrote Wiley. 'Unless you find a profit in fencing off universal properties of mankind into exclusive tribal ownership.
To yell black-on-black crime is to shoot a man and then shame him for bleeding. And
The question is unanswerable, which is not to say futile.
The Struggle is in your name, Samori—you were named for Samori Touré, who struggled against French colonizers for the right to his own black body.
That I really was the wretch they made me out to be, and deserved no more than the abuses I received.
Shortly before you were born, I was pulled over by the PG County police, the same police that all the D.C. poets had warned me of. They approached on both sides of the car, shining their flashing ligh...
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.
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...
Nothing between us was ever planned--not even you. We were both 24 years old when you were born, the normal age for most Americans, but among the class we soon found ourselves, we ranked as teenage pa...