We knew we did not lay down the direction of the street, but despite that, we could—and must—fashion the way of our walk.
We have made something down here. We have taken the one-drop rules of Dreamers and flipped them. They made us into a race. We made ourselves into a people. Here
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...
They were made of small hard things—aunts and uncles, smoke breaks after sex, girls on stoops drinking from mason jars. These truths carried the black body beyond slogans and gave it color and texture...
They have forgotten, because to remember would tumble them out of the beautiful Dream and force them to live down here with us, down here in the world. I am convinced that the Dreamers, at least the D...
These are the preferences of the universe itself: verbs over nouns, actions over states, struggle over hope.
There will surely always be people with straight hair and blue eyes, as there have been for all history. But some of these straight-haired people with blue eyes have been black, and this points to the...
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 more out there than I had ever hoped for, and I wanted you to have it. I wanted you to know that the world in its entirety could never be found in the schools, alone, nor on the streets, alo...
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 was before you, and then there was after, and in this after, you were the God I'd never had.
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 violence that undergirded the country, so flagrantly on display during Black History Month, and the intimate violence of Yeah, nigger, what’s up now? were not unrelated. And this violence was not...
The truth of us was always that you were our ring. We’d summoned you out of ourselves, and you were not given a vote. If only for that reason, you deserved all the protection we could muster. Everythi...
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 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 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 precious thing I had then is the most precious thing I have now—my own curiosity. That is the thing I knew, even in the classroom, they could not take from me. That is the thing that buoyed m...
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...