What I wanted was to put as much distance between you and that blinding fear as possible.
We stood in the alley where we shot basketballs through hollowed crates and cracked jokes on the boy whose mother wore him out with a beating in front of his entire fifth-grade class. We sat on the nu...
We meant well. We tried our best. Good intention is a hall pass through history, a sleeping pill that ensures the Dream.
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 question what I see, then to question what I see after that, because the questions matter as much, perhaps more than, the answers.
To Trump whiteness is neither notional nor symbolic but is the very core of his power. In this, Trump is not singular. But whereas his forebears carried whiteness like an ancestral talisman, Trump cra...
Through the windshield Isaw the mark of theseghettos—the abundance ofbeauty shops, churches,liquor stores, andcrumbling housing—and Ifelt the old fear. Throughthe windshield I saw therain coming down...
This idea was the deep subtext of our lives. It had to be. The visible text was survivalist.
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...
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...
The utter contempt with which privileged Eastern liberals such as myself discuss red-state, gun-country, working-class America as ridiculous and morons and rubes, charged the celebrity chef Anthony Bo...
The pursuit of knowing was freedom to me,
The pursuit of knowing was freedom to me, the right to declare your own curiosities and follow them through all manner of books. I was made for the library, not the classroom. The classroom was a jail...
The problem with the police is not that they are fascist pigs but that our country is ruled by majoritarian pigs.
The kind of trenchant racism to which black people have persistently been subjected can never be defeated by making its victims more respectable.
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 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 Dream thrives on generalization, on limiting the number of possible questions, on privileging immediate answers.
The Dream smells like peppermint but tastes like strawberry shortcake.
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...