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.
Perhaps our triumphs are not even the point. Perhaps struggle is all we have because the god of history is an atheist, and nothing about his world is meant to be.
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...
Your grandmother was not teaching me how to behave in class. She was teaching me how to ruthlessly interrogate the subject that elicited the most sympathy and rationalizing -- myself. Here was the les...
I was a curious boy, but the schools were not concerned with curiosity. They were concerned with compliance. I loved a few of my teachers. But I cannot say that I truly believed any of them.
On the last day of her visit I drove your grandmother to the airport. Your mother was her only child, as you are my only child, and having watched you grow I know that nothing could possibly be more p...
Indeed, if you’re looking for a bridge, if you’re looking for someone to connect the heart of black America with the heart of all of America, to allow us all to look at the American dream in the same...
The belief that the Civil War wasn’t for us was the result of the country’s long search for a narrative that could reconcile white people with each other, one that avoided what professional historians...
The Earth is not our creation. It has no respect for us. It has no use for us.
I loved Malcolm because Malcolm never lied, unlike the schools and their façade of morality, unlike the streets and their bravado, unlike the world of dreamers. I loved him because he made it plain, n...
I have spent much of my studies searching for the right question by which I might fully understand the breach between the world and me. I have not spent my time studying the problem of 'race' - 'race'...
The Jim Crow South, writes Ira Katznelson, a history and political science professor at Columbia, was the one collaborator America’s democracy could not do without. The marks of that collaboration are...
They were made of small hard things—aunts and uncles, smoke breaks after sex, girls on stoops drinking from mason jars. These truths carried the black body beyond slogans and gave it color and texture...
And I felt in this a cosmic injustice, a profound cruelty, which infused an abiding, irrepressible desire to unshackle my body and achieve the velocity of escape.
A hostile reading of those words hinges on a misunderstanding of the complexities of segregation. In fact, for the legions of black people who grew up like Michelle Obama—in a functioning, self-contai...
Our current politics tell you that should you fall victim to such an assault and lose your body, it somehow must be your fault. Trayvon
This is your country, that this is your world, that this is your body, and you must find a way to live within the all of it
If he hated, he hated because it was human for the enslaved to hate the enslaver, natural as Prometheus hating the birds.
To question what I see, then to question what I see after that, because the questions matter as much, perhaps more than, the answers.
He went back to Baldwin, who posed the great paradox that would haunt him to the end: Who among us would integrate into a burning house?
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