I do not long for those days. I have no desire to make you tough or street, perhaps because any toughness I garnered came reluctantly. I think I was always, somehow, aware of the price. I think I some...
I do not believe that we can stop them, Samori, because they must ultimately stop themselves. And still I urge you to struggle. Struggle for the memory of your ancestors. Struggle for wisdom. Struggle...
I came up in segregated West Baltimore. I understood black as a culture—as Etta James, jumping the broom, the Electric Slide. I understood the history and the politics, the debilitating effects of rac...
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.
Fully 60 percent of all young black men who drop out of high school will go to jail. This should disgrace the country. But it does not,
For African Americans, war commenced not in 1861, but in 1661, when the Virginia Colony began passing America's first black codes, the charter documents of a slave society that rendered blacks a perma...
Everyone of any import, from Jesus to George Washington, was white.
But this girl with the long dreads revealed something else--that love could be soft and understanding; that, soft or hard, love was an act of heroism.
But rage alone is aimless, untamed, inept. When what we need is .
But a great number of educators spoke of personal responsibility in a country authored and sustained by a criminal irresponsibility.
But I know that it has happened to you already, that you have deduced that you are privileged and yet still different from other privileged children, because you are a bearer of a body more fragile th...
Black-on black crime' is jargon, violence on language, which vanishes the men who engineered the covenants, who fixed the loans, who planned the projects, who built the streets and sold red ink by the...
As slaves we were this country’s first windfall, the down payment on its freedom.
Art was not motivational speaking. Art was not sentimental. It had no responsibility to hopeful or optimistic or make anyone feel better about the world. It must reflect the world in all it's brutalit...
And you are here now, and you must live—and there is so much out there to live for, not just in someone else’s country, but in your own home.
And it became clear that this was not just for the dreams concocted by Americans to justify themselves but also for the dreams that I had conjured to replace them. I had thought that I must mirror the...
Love could be soft and understanding; that, soft or hard, love was an act of heroism
What matters is our condition, what matters is the system that makes your body breakable.
Traveling as a pointless luxury, like blowing the rent check on a pink suit.
The month could not pass without a series of films dedicated to the glories of being beaten on camera.