We know what we are, that we walk like we are not long for this world, that this world has never longed for us.
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...
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...
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.
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
I didn’t always have things, but I had people—I always had people.
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...
This need to be always on guard was an unmeasured expenditure of energy, the slow siphoning of the essence.
This story began, as all writing must, in failure.
My impulses were not filled with unfailing virtue.
Whatever we might make of this country’s criminal justice policy, it cannot be said that it was imposed by a repressive minority. The abuses that have followed from these policies—the sprawling carcer...
When presidential candidate Barack Obama presented himself to the black community, he was not to be believed. It strained credulity to think that a man sporting the same rigorously managed haircut as...
Later, I would hear it in Dad’s voice—Either I can beat him, or the police. Maybe that saved me. Maybe it didn’t. All I know is, the violence rose from the fear like smoke from a fire, and I cannot sa...
Sometimes fail to walk the air
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