The irony of Barack Obama is this: He has become the most successful black politician in American history by avoiding the radioactive racial issues of yesteryear, by being clean (as Joe Biden once lab...
The idea of race as an indelible attribute is a new idea at the heart of these new people who have been brought up hopelessly, tragically, deceitfully, to believe that they are white. These people are...
The historian David M. Oshinsky notes in his book Worse Than Slavery: Parchman Farm and the Ordeal of Jim Crow Justice that from 1900 to 1930, African Americans in Mississippi comprised about 67 perce...
The guns seemed to address this country, which invented the streets that secured them with despotic police, in its primary language—violence.
The fact and wisdom of nonviolence may be beyond dispute-the civil rights movement profoundly transformed the country. Yet the movement demanded of African Americans a superhuman capacity for forgiven...
The changes have awarded me a rapture that comes only when you can no longer be lied to, when you have rejected the Dream.
The Struggle is in your name, Samori - you were named for Samori Toure, who struggled against French colonizers for the right to his own black body. He died in captivity, but the profits of that strug...
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...
Southern whites also understood they were in a state of war, and subsequently turned the antebellum South into a police state.
Should the Dreamers reap what they had sown, we would reap it right with them.
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...
Poetry aims for an economy of truth—loose and useless words must be discarded,
Our position is thoroughly identified with the institution of slavery, declared Mississippi as it left the Union, the greatest material interest of the world.
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
One cannot, at once, claim to be superhuman and then plead mortal error.
Not being violent enough could cost me my body. Being too violent could cost me my body.
My understanding of the universe was physical, and its moral arc bent toward chaos then concluded in a box.
Michael Brown did not die as so many of his defenders supposed. And still the questions behind the questions are never asked. Should assaulting an officer of the state be a capital offense, rendered w...
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...
In a recent New Yorker article, a former Russian military officer pointed out that Russian interference in the election could only succeed where necessary conditions and an existing background were pr...