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 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...
White supremacy is a crime and a lie, but it's also a machine that generates meaning. This existential gift, as much as anything, is the source of its enormous, centuries-spanning power.
White America is a syndicate arrayed to protect its exclusive power to dominate and control our bodies. Sometimes this power is direct (lynching), and sometimes it is insidious (redlining).
White America' is a syndicate arrayed to protect its exclusive power to dominate and control our bodies, Sometimes this power is direct (lynching), and sometimes it is insidious (redlining). But howev...
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 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...
Whatever Obama’s other triumphs, arguably his greatest has been an expansion of the black imagination to encompass this: the idea that a man can be culturally black and many other things also—biracial...
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 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.
We are all our beautiful bodies and so must never be prostrate before barbarians, must never submit our original self, our one of one, to defiling and plunder.
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 practiced habit of jabbing out one’s eyes and forgetting the work of one’s hands. To
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 is difficult because there exists, all around us, an apparatus urging us to accept American innocence at face value and not to inquire too much.