If there was one thing that South Carolina feared more than bad Negro government, wrote Du Bois, it was good Negro government.
I write you in your fifteenth year. I am writing you because this was the year you saw Eric Garner choked to death for selling cigarettes; because you know now that Renisha McBride was shot for seekin...
I was made for the library, not the classroom.
I was learning the craft of poetry, which really was an intensive version of what my mother had taught me all those years ago -- the craft of writing as the art of thinking. Poetry aims for an economy...
I was a curious boy, but the schools were not concerned in curiosity. They were concerned in compliance... 60% of all black men who drop out of school end up in jail. This should disgrace our country,...
I remember sitting in my seventh-grade French class and not having any idea why I was there. I did not know any French people, and nothing around me suggested I ever would. France was a rock rotating...
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 don't ever want to forget, even with whatever personal victories I achieve, even in the victories we achieve as a people or a nation, that t he larger story of America and the world does not end wel...
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 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.
I am ashamed that I made an error, knowing that our errors always cost us more.
Hmm... 'our' country? I have not spoken in this manner in some years. But Wakanda is my home. Wakanda is our home.
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....
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.
But I was grounded and domesticated by the plain fact that should I now go down, I would not go down alone.
Breathing. I just dream of breathing
All this time you were growing into words and feelings; my beautiful brown boy, who would soon come into the knowledge, who would soon comprehend the edicts of his galaxy, and all the extinction-level...
White innocence—the need to believe that whatever might befall the country, white America is ultimately blameless.
The facts of my native world, I came to understand that my country was a galaxy, and this galaxy stretched from the pandemonium of West Baltimore to the happy hunting grounds of Mr. Belvedere. I obses...