What did it mean to, as our elders told us, grow up and be somebody? And what precisely did this have to do with an education rendered as rote discipline?
What if it was true that the masses of white Americans had not been fooled at all but that a critical mass of them had simply identified with a set of interests that were not purely economic and so po...
What was required was a new story, a new history told through the lens of our struggle. I had always known this, had heard the need for a new history in Malcolm, had seen the need addressed in my fath...
When Abraham Lincoln declared, in 1863, that the battle of Gettysburg must ensure 'that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth,' he was not merely bei...
When I came to Howard, Chancellor Williams’s Destruction of Black Civilization was my Bible.
When our elders presented school to us, they did not present it as a place of high learning but as a means of escape from death and penal warehousing. Fully 60 percent of all young black men who drop...
When our elders presented school to us, they did not present it as a place of high learning but as a means of escape from death and penal warehousing.
When our elders presented school to use, they did not present it as a place of high learning but as a means of escape from death and personal warehousing. Fully 60 percent of all young black men who d...
When the journalist asked me about my body, it was like she was asking me to awaken her from the most gorgeous dream. I have seen that dream all my life... The Dream smells like peppermint but tastes...
When the journalist asked me about my body, it was like she was asking me to awaken her from the most gorgeous dream.
Who is the Tolstoy of the Zulus?
You have seen all the wonderful life up above the tree-line, yet you understand that there is no real distance between you and Trayvon Martin, and thus Trayvon Martin must terrify you in a way that he...
You have to make your peace with the chaos, but you cannot lie. You cannot forget how much they took from us and how they transfigured our very bodies into sugar, tobacco, cotton, and gold.
You must resist the common urge toward the comforting narrative of divine law, toward fairy tales that imply some irrepressible justice.
You will have to man up, we tell our sons. Anyone can make a baby, but it takes a man to be a father.
You would be a man one day, and I could not save you from the unbridgeable distance between you and your future peers and colleagues, who might try to convince you that everything I know, all the thin...
Your life is so very different from my own. The grandness of the world, the real world, the whole world, is a known thing for you. And you have no need of dispatches because you have seen so much of t...
A compilation of nearly all public presidential utterances—proclamations, news-conference remarks, executive orders—and found that in his first two years as president, Obama talked less about race tha...
And I did not ask. Later I felt bad about this. I knew, even then, that whenever I nodded along in ignorance, I lost an opportunity, betrayed the wonder in me by privileging the appearance of knowing...
But talent is nothing without a field on which to display its gifts.
Showing 641 to 660 of 928 results