But all our phrasing—race relations, racial chasm, racial justice, racial profiling, white privilege, even white supremacy—serves to obscure that racism is a visceral experience, that it dislodges bra...
Black-on-black crime’ is jargon, violence to language, which vanishes the men who engineered the covenants, who fixed the loans, who planned the projects, who built the streets and sold red ink by the...
Barack Obama governs a nation enlightened enough to send an African American to the White House, but not enlightened enough to accept a black man as its president.
As we came off, you were moving at the dawdling speed of a small child. A white woman pushed you and said, Come on! Many things now happened at once. There was the reaction of any parent when a strang...
And there can be no conflict between the naming of whiteness and the naming of the degradation brought about by an unrestrained capitalism, by the privileging of greed and the legal encouragement to h...
And the history of civilization is littered with dead races (Frankish, Italian, German, Irish) later abandoned because they no longer serve their purpose—the organization of people beneath, and beyond...
And I am afraid. I feel the fear most acutely whenever you leave me. But I was afraid long before you, and in this I was unoriginal. When I was your age the only people I knew were black, and all of t...
All my life I’d heard people tell their black boys and black girls to be twice as good, which is to say accept half as much.
This. To yell black-on-black crime is to shoot a man and then shame him for bleeding.
Rights gradually awarded to the mass of European poor and oppressed, at precisely the same time they were being stripped from enslaved Africans and their descendants.
Nonviolent? I speak not of the morality of nonviolence, but of the sense that blacks are in especial need of this morality.
You will have to man up, we tell our sons. Anyone can make a baby, but it takes a man to be a father.
You must resist the common urge toward the comforting narrative of divine law, toward fairy tales that imply some irrepressible justice.
You deserved so much more, little flower. You deserved a Wakanda that cherished you.
Why - for us and only us - is the other side of free will and free spirits an assault on our bodies?
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 the journalist asked me about my body, it was like she was asking me to awaken her from the most gorgeous dream.
When I came to Howard, Chancellor Williams’s Destruction of Black Civilization was my Bible.
When Abraham Lincoln declared, in 1863, that the battle of Gettysburg must ensure 'that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth,' he was not merely bei...
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...