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...
The Dream is the enemy of all art, courageous thinking, and honest writing.
Thandiwe, when they come for you, do not scream. Do not plead. Do not cry, for your cries are but song to them.
So I feared not just the violence of this world but the rules designed to protect you from it, the rules that would have you contort your body to address the block, and contort again to be taken serio...
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...
Should assaulting an officer of the state be a capital offense, rendered without trial, with the officer as judge and executioner? Is that what we wish civilization to be? And
She compared America to Rome. She said she thought the glory days of this country had long ago passed, and even those glory days were sullied: They had been built on the bodies of others. And we can’t...
She also taught me to write, by which I mean not simply organizing a set of sentences into a series of paragraphs, but organizing them as a means of investigation. When I was in trouble at school (whi...
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 fencing off universal properties of mankind into exclusive tribal owne...
Racism—the need to ascribe bone-deep features to people and then humiliate, reduce, and destroy them—
Racism was banditry, pure and simple. And the banditry was not incidental to America, it was essential to it.
Our parents resorted to the lash the way flagellants in the plague years resorted to the scourge.
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
My experience in this world has been that the people who believe themselves to be white are obsessed with the politics of personal exoneration. And the word racist, to them, conjures, if not a tobacco...
Malcolm was the first political pragmatist I knew, the first honest man I’d ever heard. He was unconcerned with making the people who believed they were white comfortable in their belief. If he was an...
Later, I would hear it in Dad’s voice—Either I can beat him, or the police. Maybe that saved me. Maybe it didn’t. All I know is, the violence rose from the fear like smoke from a fire, and I cannot sa...
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 is not necessary that you believe that the officer who choked Eric Garner set out that day to destroy a body. All you need to understand is that the officer carries with him the power of the Americ...
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...
In accepting both the chaos of history and the fact of my total end, I was freed to truly consider how I wished to live-- specifically, how do I live free in this black body? It is a profound question...