Some time ago I rejected magic in all its forms. This rejection was a gift from your grandparents, who never tried to console me with ideas of an afterlife and were skeptical of preordained American g...
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.
But talent is nothing without a field on which to display its gifts.
A compilation of nearly all public presidential utterances—proclamations, news-conference remarks, executive orders—and found that in his first two years as president, Obama talked less about race tha...
Your life is so very different from my own. The grandness of the world, the real world, the whole world, is a known thing for you. And you have no need of dispatches because you have seen so much of t...
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 have to make your peace with the chaos, but you cannot lie. You cannot forget how much they took from us and how they transfigured our very bodies into sugar, tobacco, cotton, and gold.
You have seen all the wonderful life up above the tree-line, yet you understand that there is no real distance between you and Trayvon Martin, and thus Trayvon Martin must terrify you in a way that he...
Why - for us and only us - is the other side of free will and free spirits an assault on our bodies?
Who is the Tolstoy of the Zulus?
White America is a syndicate arrayed to protect its exclusive power to dominate and control our bodies. Sometimes this power is direct (lynching), and sometimes it is insidious (redlining).
White America' is a syndicate arrayed to protect its exclusive power to dominate and control our bodies, Sometimes this power is direct (lynching), and sometimes it is insidious (redlining). But howev...
When the journalist asked me about my body, it was like she was asking me to awaken her from the most gorgeous dream.
When the journalist asked me about my body, it was like she was asking me to awaken her from the most gorgeous dream. I have seen that dream all my life... The Dream smells like peppermint but tastes...
When our elders presented school to use, they did not present it as a place of high learning but as a means of escape from death and personal warehousing. Fully 60 percent of all young black men who d...
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.
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...
Whatever Obama’s other triumphs, arguably his greatest has been an expansion of the black imagination to encompass this: the idea that a man can be culturally black and many other things also—biracial...