The enslaved were not bricks in your road, and their lives were not chapters in your redemptive history. They were people turned to fuel for the American machine. Enslavement was not destined to end,...
The classroom was a jail of other people’s interests. The library was open, unending, free. Slowly,
That he was outnumbered did not matter because the whole world had outnumbered him long ago, and what do numbers matter?
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...
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
Regarder cette réalité en face est douloureux. Mais notre lexique tout entier - relations interraciales, discriminations, justice raciale, profilage racial, privilège blanc et même suprématie blanche...
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.
Racial attitudes had a significantly greater impact on health care opinions when framed as part of President Obama’s plan than they had when the exact same policies were attributed to President Clinto...
Our parents resorted to the lash the way flagellants in the plague years resorted to the scourge.
Once, the Dream's parameters were caged by technology and by the limits of horsepower and wind. But the Dreamers have improved themselves, and the damming of seas for voltage, the extraction of coal,...
No matter what the professional talkers tell you, I never met a black boy who wanted to fail.
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...
It was the Home Owners' Loan Corporation, not a private trade association, that pioneered the practice of redlining, selectively granting loans and insisting that any property it insured be covered by...
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 the cities of the North, European immigrants’ struggle for the credential of whiteness gave them the motive to oppress blacks, writes Christopher Muller, a sociologist at Columbia who studies incar...