Love could be soft and understanding; that, soft or hard, love was an act of heroism
White innocence—the need to believe that whatever might befall the country, white America is ultimately blameless.
Whatever we might make of this country’s criminal justice policy, it cannot be said that it was imposed by a repressive minority. The abuses that have followed from these policies—the sprawling carcer...
What matters is our condition, what matters is the system that makes your body breakable.
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.
The black body is the clearest evidence that America is the work of men.
Specious
Rights of whites were largely seen as dependent on the degradation of blacks.
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...
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...
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.
You exist. You matter. You have value. You have every right to wear your hoodie, to play your music as loud as you want. You have every right to be you.
White men, wrote Mississippi senator and eventual president of the Confederacy Jefferson Davis, have an equality resulting from a presence of a lower caste, which cannot exist were white men to fill t...
When people discuss the drug war, they are usually referring to the one that began in the 1970s, without realizing that this was, at least, our third drug war in the twentieth century. I found David F...
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...
When it came to her son, Dr. Jones’s country did what it does best—it forgot him. The forgetting is habit, is yet another necessary component of the Dream. They have forgotten the scale of theft that...
When I came to Howard, Chancellor Williams’s Destruction of Black Civilization was my Bible.
What we must never do is willingly hand over our own bodies or the bodies of our friends. That was the wisdom: We knew we did not lay down the direction of the street, but despite that, we could—and m...
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’d summoned you out of ourselves, and you were not given a vote. If only for that reason, you deserved all the protection we could muster.