I grew up in a house drawn between love and fear. There was no room for softness. But this girl with the long dreads revealed something else—that love could be soft and understanding; that, soft or ha...
I don't ever want to forget, even with whatever personal victories I achieve, even in the victories we achieve as a people or a nation, that t he larger story of America and the world does not end wel...
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...
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?
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,
Every Trump voter is certainly not a white supremacist, just as every white person in the Jim Crow South was not a white supremacist. But every Trump voter felt it was acceptable to hand the fate of t...
Even in those pieces that seemed to be casually tossed off, I was always searching for the right word, for the proper escape from the clichés that threatened every sentence, from truisms that threaten...
But satire wasn't within my grasp then; satire is itself a privilege—one that evidences a knowledge of its target.
But perhaps the question is not whether you can stand with the king... but whether your king can stand with you.
But families don’t exist independent of their environment.
But all our phrasing—race relations, racial chasm, racial justice, racial profiling, white privilege, even white supremacy—serves to obscure that racism is a visceral experience, that it dislodges bra...
But I was grounded and domesticated by the plain fact that should I now go down, I would not go down alone.
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...
Black is beautiful
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 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...
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 injustice.
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.
All of these heroes had failed to cajole and coerce the masters of America. Their ambition of a better world had been frustrated. This was the story of my ancestors, the story I expected for myself. T...