The jails springing up around me, that argued for ghettos and projects, that viewed the destruction of the black body as incidental to the preservation of order.
So that America might justify itself, the story of a black body’s destruction must always begin with his or her error, real or imagined—with Eric Garner’s anger, with Trayvon Martin’s mythical words (...
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...
Rights of whites were largely seen as dependent on the degradation of blacks.
Perhaps being named black was just someone’s name for being at the bottom, a human turned to object, object turned to pariah.
Ours. By then I’d read Chancellor Williams, J. A. Rogers, and John Jackson—writers central to the canon of our new noble history. From them I knew that Mansa Musa of Mali was black, and Shabaka of Egy...
You... kill... what you cannot control. Break... what you cannot bend. Is this what all my teachings have brought you to? Victory by any means? Conquest? Terror? You say you oppose kings, and yet your...
When our elders presented school to us, they did not present it as a place of high learning but as a means of escape from death and penal warehousing. Fully 60 percent of all young black men who drop...
What did it mean to, as our elders told us, grow up and be somebody? And what precisely did this have to do with an education rendered as rote discipline?
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.
To question what I see, then to question what I see after that, because the questions matter as much, perhaps more than, the answers.
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...
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...
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...
The pursuit of knowing was freedom to me, the right to declare your own curiosities and follow them through all manner of books. I was made for the library, not the classroom. The classroom was a jail...
The problem with the police is not that they are fascist pigs but that our country is ruled by majoritarian pigs.
The galaxy belonged to them, and as terror was communicated to our children, I saw mastery communicated to theirs.
The fact of Barack Obama, of Michelle Obama, changed our lives. Their very existence opened a market. It is important to say this, to say it in this ugly, inelegant way. It is important to remember th...
The destroyers will rarely be held accountable. Mostly they will receive pensions. And
The destroyers will rarely be held accountable. Mostly they will receive pensions. And destruction is merely the superlative form of a dominion whose prerogatives include friskings, detainings, beatin...