We are not blind to recent events, Tetu. Nor are we blind to Damisa-Sakri's allies. But we are, as you say, a new country, a new nation. Prudence is required. Even in your allies. Especially our alli...
Think of all the embraces, all the private jokes, customs, greetings, names, dreams, all the shared knowledge and capacity of a black family injected into that vessel of flesh and bone. And think of h...
There were distinct advantages to black atheism, to a disbelief in dreams and moral appeal. First, it removed the weight of believing that white people, en masse, were interested listeners. White peop...
There was before you, and then there was after, and in this after, you were the God I’d never had. I submitted before your needs, and I knew then that I must survive for something more than survival’s...
There are no racists in America, or at least none that the people who need to be white know personally. In
The rising tide theory rested on a notion of separate but equal class ladders. And so there was a class of black poor and an equivalent class of white poor, a black middle class and a white middle cla...
The truth is that the police reflect America in all of its will and fear, and whatever we might make of this country's criminal justice policy, it cannot be said that it was imposed by a repressive mi...
The streets transform every ordinary day into a series of trick questions, and every incorrect answer risks a beat-down, a shooting, or a pregnancy. No one survives unscathed. And yet the heat that sp...
The spirit and soul are the body and brain, which are destructible- that is precisely why they are so precious. And the soul did not escape. The spirit did not steal away on gospel wings.
The question is unanswerable, which is not to say futile.
The question is not whether Lincoln truly meant ‘government of the people’ but what our country has, throughout its history, taken the political term ‘people’ to actually mean. In 1863 it did not mean...
The pursuit of knowledge was freedom to me, the right to declare your own curiosities and follow them through all manner of books.
The noble white labor archetype did not give white workers immunity from capitalism. It could not, in itself break monopolies, alleviate white poverty in Appalachia or the South, nor bring a decent wa...
The most powerful country in the world has handed over all of it's affairs, the prosperity of an entire economy, the security of some 300 million citizens, the purity of it's water, the viability of i...
The last slaveholder has been dead for a very long time. The last soldier to endure Valley Forge has been dead much longer. To proudly claim the veteran and disown the slaveholder is patriotism a la c...
The irony of Barack Obama is this: He has become the most successful black politician in American history by avoiding the radioactive racial issues of yesteryear, by being clean (as Joe Biden once lab...
The historian David M. Oshinsky notes in his book Worse Than Slavery: Parchman Farm and the Ordeal of Jim Crow Justice that from 1900 to 1930, African Americans in Mississippi comprised about 67 perce...
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 classroom was a jail of other people’s interests. The library was open, unending, free. Slowly,