The classroom was a jail of other people’s interests. The library was open, unending, free. Slowly,
The destroyers will rarely be held accountable. Mostly they will receive pensions. And destruction is merely the superlative form of a dominion whose prerogatives include friskings, detainings, beatin...
The enslaved were not bricks in your road, and their lives were not chapters in your redemptive history. They were people turned to fuel for the American machine. Enslavement was not destined to end,...
The enslaved were not bricks in your road, and their lives were not chapters in your redemptive history. They were people turned to fuel for the American machine.
The entire narrative of this country argues against the truth of who you are.
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 girl with the long dreads who slept with whomever she chose, that being her own declaration of control over her body, was there. I grew up in a house drawn between love and fear. There was no room...
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 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 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 killing fields of Chicago, of Baltimore, of Detroit, were created by the policy of Dreamers, but their weight, their shame, rests solely upon those who are dying in them. There is a great deceptio...
The low whites, men such as our own Harlan, were tolerated publicly by the Quality, but spurned in private; their names were spat out at banquets, their children mocked in the parlors, their wives and...
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...
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 next day I got up early and walked through the city. I visited the Musee Rodin. I stopped in a bistro, and with all the fear of a boy approaching a beautiful girl at a party, I ordered two beers a...
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 pursuit of knowledge was freedom to me, the right to declare your own curiosities and follow them through all manner of books.
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 question is unanswerable, which is not to say futile. The greatest reward of this constant interrogation, of confrontation with the brutality of my country, is that it has freed me from ghosts and...
The question is unanswerable, which is not to say futile.
Showing 581 to 600 of 928 results