What I told you is what your grandparents tried to tell me: that this is your country, that this is your world, that this is your body, and you must find some way to live within the all of it. I tell...
We know how we will die—with cousins in double murder suicides, in wars that are mere theory to you, convalescing in hospitals, slowly choked out by angina and cholesterol. We are the walking lowest r...
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 all so injured, daughter-- all of us. Even him-- perhaps especially him. This name-- haramu-fal-- was made to mock him. But perhaps it mocks us all. Perhaps it speaks to all of our losses.
Una volta i parametri del Sogno erano ingabbiati dalla tecnologia e dai limiti dell’uso dei cavalli e del vento. Ma i Sognatori hanno fatto grandi progressi, e l’utilizzo dell’acqua per l’elettricità,...
Trump truly is something new—the first president whose entire political existence hinges on the fact of a black president. And so it will not suffice to say Trump is a white man like all the others wh...
To understand that the most costly war in this country’s history was launched in direct opposition to everything the country claims to be, to understand that this war was the product of centuries of e...
To secure the White House, Obama needed to be a Harvard-trained lawyer with a decade of political experience and an incredible gift for speaking to cross sections of the country; Donald Trump needed o...
To proudly claim the veteran and disown the slaveholder is patriotism à la carte.
To acknowledge these horrors means turning away from the brightly rendered version of your country as it has always declared itself and turning toward something murkier and unknown. It is still too di...
This is the foundation of the Dream—its adherents must not just believe in it but believe that it is just, believe that their possession of the Dream is the natural result of grit, honor, and good wor...
This chasm makes itself known to us in all kinds of ways. A little girl wanders home, at age seven, after being teased in school and asks her parents, Are we niggers and what does this mean?
They were utterly fearless. I did not understand it until I looked out on the street. That was where I saw white parents pushing double-wide strollers down gentrifying Harlem boulevards in T-shirts an...
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 new people are, like us, a modern invention. But unlike us, their new name has no real meaning divorced from the machinery of criminal power. The new people were something else before they were...
These men are Wakandan, even in rebellion. Pride in their nation was everything to them. And when the Golden City fell, they fell with it. Now they fashion their very bodies into living bombs, for the...
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...