Our position is thoroughly identified with the institution of slavery, declared Mississippi as it left the Union, the greatest material interest of the world.
No. How dare you . You were the guardian of throne and country. And now I, having cast aside my life for you, find the Dora Milaje and their capatain turned jambazi! What has come of you, Aneka? What...
No matter what the professional talkers tell you, I never met a black boy who wanted to fail.
My work is to give you what I know of my own particular path while allowing you to walk your own.
It is important to remember the inconsequence of one’s talent and hard work and the incredible and unmatched sway of luck and fate. I knew it even as it was happening. I felt that I had not changed, b...
It is hard to face this. But all our phrasing—race relations, racial chasm, racial justice, racial profiling, white privilege, even white supremacy—serves to obscure that racism is a visceral experien...
It has nothing to do with how you wear your pants or how you style your hair. The breach is as intentional as policy, as intentional as the forgetting that follows. The breach allows for the efficient...
It did not occur to me that writing is always some form of interpretation, some form of translating the specificity of one’s roots or expertise or even one’s own mind into language that can be absorbe...
Indeed, the panic of white slavery lives on in our politics today. Black workers suffer, something in nature has gone awry. And so an opioid epidemic is greeted with a call for treatment and sympathy,...
In those days I would come out of the house, turn onto Flatbush Avenue, and my face would tighten like a Mexican wrestler's mask, my eyes would dart from corner to corner, my arms loose, limber, and r...
In the cities of the North, European immigrants’ struggle for the credential of whiteness gave them the motive to oppress blacks, writes Christopher Muller, a sociologist at Columbia who studies incar...
In such revisions of history lay the roots of the noble Lost Cause—the belief that the South didn’t lose, so much as it was simply overwhelmed by superior numbers; that General Robert E. Lee was a con...
In short, Obama, his family, and his administration were a walking advertisement for the ease with which black people could be fully integrated into the unthreatening mainstream of American culture, p...
In accepting both the chaos of history and the fact of my total end, I was freed to truly consider how I wished to live—specifically, how do I live free in this black body?
In a democracy, so the saying goes, the people get the government they deserve. Part of Obama’s genius is a remarkable ability to soothe race consciousness among whites. Any black person who’s worked...
If I could have chosen a flag back then, it would have been embroidered with a portrait of Malcolm X, dressed in a business suit, his tie dangling, one hand parting a window shade, the other holding a...
I was only beginning to be wary of my own humanity, of my own hurt and anger--I didn't yet realize that the boot on your neck is just as likely to make you delusional as it is to ennoble.
I was made for the library, not the classroom.
I was made for the library, not the classroom. The classroom was a jail of other people's interests. The library was open, unending, free.
I was growing, and if I could not name my anguish precisely I still knew there was nothing noble in it.