The changes [in my life] have taught me how to best exploit that singular gift of study, to question what I see, then to question what I see after that, because the questions matter as much, perhaps m...
The Earth is not our creation. It has no respect for us. It has no use for us.
The Dream is the enemy of all art, courageous thinking, and honest writing.
That wisdom is not unique to our people, but I think it has special meaning to those of us born out of mass rape, whose ancestors were carried off and divided up into policies and stocks.
Thandiwe, when they come for you, do not scream. Do not plead. Do not cry, for your cries are but song to them.
Slavery is not an indefinable mass of flesh. IT is a particular, specific enslaved woman, whose mind is active as your own, whose range of feeling is as vast as your own; who prefers the way the light...
Sell cigarettes without the proper authority and your body can be destroyed.
Poetry aims for an economy of truth - loose and useless words bust be discarded, and I found that these loose and useless words were not separate from loose and useless thoughts. Poetry was not simply...
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.
Now at night, I held you and a great fear, wide as all our American generations, took me. Now I personally understood my father and the old mantra - 'Either I can beat him or the police.' I understood...
Liberals today mostly view racism not as an active, distinct evil but as a relative of white poverty and inequality. They ignore the long tradition of this country actively punishing black success—and...
It was always right in front of me. The fear was there in the extravagant boys of my neighborhood, in their large rings and medallions, their big puffy coats and full-length fur-collared leathers, whi...
It must have been around that time that I discovered an essay by Ralph Wiley in which he responded to Bellow’s quip. Tolstoy is the Tolstoy of the Zulus, wrote Wiley. Unless you find a profit in fenci...
It is insufficient to state the obvious of Donald Trump: that he is a white man who would not be president were it not for this fact.
In America, the injury is not in being born with darker skin, with fuller lips, with a broader nose, but in everything that happens after.
If he hated, he hated because it was human for the enslaved to hate the enslaver, natural as Prometheus hating the birds.
I will be king. Your country needs me. I'm gonna bring out the best in Wakanda. And what is best in Wakanda is that fantastic pile of vibranium. I'm gonna make 'em love me, baby.
I was wrong. My enemy is not a beguiler, but a revealer. She brings out of us all the awful feelings that we have hidden away. And makes them manifest. So I know now that this is who I am. Might. Sham...
I wanted to pursue things, to know things, but I could not match the means of knowing that came naturally to me with the expectations of professors. The pursuit of knowing was freedom to me, the right...
I never wanted you to be twice as good as them, so much as I have always wanted you to attack every day of your brief bright life in struggle. The people who must believe they are white can never be y...