The black body is the clearest evidence that America is the work of men.
Of the Sun, Wonderful Ethiopians of the Ancient Cushite Empire, The African Origins of Civilization
Not have the privilege of living in ignorance of this essential fact.
You will have to man up, we tell our sons. Anyone can make a baby, but it takes a man to be a father. This is what they had told me all my life.
You exist. You matter. You have value. You have every right to wear your hoodie, to play your music as loud as you want. You have every right to be you.
When people discuss the drug war, they are usually referring to the one that began in the 1970s, without realizing that this was, at least, our third drug war in the twentieth century. I found David F...
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...
We’d summoned you out of ourselves, and you were not given a vote. If only for that reason, you deserved all the protection we could muster.
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 live in a goal-oriented era. Our media vocabulary is full of hot takes, big ideas, and grand theories of everything. But some time ago I rejected magic in all its forms...In accepting both the chao...
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.
The writer, and that was what I was becoming, must be wary of every Dream and every nation, even his own nation. Perhaps his own nation more than any other, precisely because it was his own.
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 robbery of time is not measured in lifespans but in moments.
The question is unanswerable, which is not to say futile. The greatest reward of this constant interrogation, of confrontation with the brutality of my country, is that it has freed me from ghosts and...
The pursuit of knowledge was freedom to me, the right to declare your own curiosities and follow them through all manner of books.
The people who must believe they are white can never be your measuring stick.
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...