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...
Some days I would take the train into Manhattan. There was so much money everywhere, money flowing out of bistros and cafes, money pushing the people at incredible speeds, up the wide avenues, money d...
So there was nothing new in the suddenly transracial spirit that saw the country, in 2008, reaching for the best part of itself. It had done so before—and then promptly retrenched in the worst part of...
She also taught me to write, by which I mean not simply organizing a set of sentences into a series of paragraphs, but organizing them as a means of investigation. When I was in trouble at school (whi...
Racism—the need to ascribe bone-deep features to people and then humiliate, reduce, and destroy them—inevitably follows from this inalterable condition. In
My reasons for writing had to be my own, divorced from expectation.
J'ai commencé à comprendre que le but de mon éducation était une forme d'inconfort, un processus qui n'était pas destiné à me récompenser avec mon propre Rêve personnel mais qui, au contraire, devait...
It is to point out that at this late hour, the totems of the empire of slavery—chief among them, its flag—still enjoy an honored place in the homes, and public spaces, of self-professed patriots and v...
It is not a mistake that Gone with the Wind is one of the most read works of American literature or that The Birth of a Nation is the most revered touchstone of all American film. Both emerge from a n...
It has been said that the first black presidency was mostly symbolic, a dismissal that deeply underestimates the power of symbols. Symbols don’t just represent reality but can become tools to change i...
In those days I imagined racism as a tumor that could be isolated and removed from the body of America, not as a pervasive system both native and essential to that body.
In this way, racism is rendered as the innocent daughter of Mother Nature, and one is left to deplore the Middle Passage or the Trail of Tears the way one deplores an earthquake, a tornado, or any oth...
In my survey course of America, I’d seen portraits of the Irish drawn in the same ravenous, lustful, and simian way. Perhaps there had been other bodies, mocked, terrorized, and insecure. Perhaps the...
If atheism is important to me, my sense of ancestry is its equal.
I was a capable boy, intelligent, well-liked, but powerfully afraid. And I felt, vaguely, wordlessly, that for a child to be marked off for such a life, to be forced to live in fear was a great injust...
I know the danger. I know we may not come back, and in so doing, doom a nation. I would give my life for my nation. But I will not give the life of my sister. I will not, yet again, be parted from my...
I don’t ever want to forget that resistance must be its own reward, since resistance, at least within the life span of the resistors, almost always fails.