From the White House on down, the myth holds that fatherhood is the great antidote to all that ails black people. But Billy Brooks Jr. had a father. Trayvon Martin had a father. Jordan Davis had a fat...
From hip-hop, I drew my earliest sense of what writing should mean. Grammar was never the point. Grammar was for the schoolmen and their television dreams. Out here, in the concrete and real, sentence...
For that particular community, for my community, the massage has long been clear: The Civil War is a story for white people - acted out by white people, on white people's terms - in which blacks featu...
Fail in the schools and you would be suspended and sent back to those same streets, where they would take your body. And I began to see these two arms in relation—those who failed in the schools justi...
Even in their final hours, my parents had hope. Once, they had put their hope in Wakanda. Now, they put their hope in Killmonger who would make Niganda great. Greater than even Wakanda. He promised th...
Disembodiment is a kind of terrorism, and the threat of it alters the orbit of all our lives and, like terrorism, this distortion is intentional.
Deception is parcel to ruling. I tell my enemies, my allies, and my subjects what they need to know, when I feel they need to know it. This philosophy tends to have some effects. A man cannot take it...
But you cannot arrange your life around them and the small chance of the Dreamers coming into consciousness. Our moment is too brief. Our bodies are too precious.
But you are human and you will make mistakes. You will misjudge. You will yell. You will drink too much. You will hang out with people you shouldn't. Not all of us can always be Jackie Robinson - not...
But while the people advocating reparations have changed over time, the response from the country has remained virtually the same. They have been taught to labor, the Chicago Tribune editorialized in...
But then he grabbed the mic like a cudgel, raised it to the sky, lightning struck, and the cudgel was now a hammer, and the slave was transfigured into a god whose voice shivered the Earth. And that i...
But the underlying presumption—that Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama could be swapped in for each other—exhibited a problem. Clinton was a candidate who’d won one competitive political race in her lif...
But sitting in that garden, for the first time I was an alien, I was a sailor - landless and disconnected. And I was sorry that I had never felt this particular loneliness before - that I had never fe...
But race is the child of racism, not the father. And the process of naming ‘the people’ has never been a matter of genealogy and physiognomy so much as one of hierarchy.
But if you see black identity as you see southern identity, or Irish identity, or Italian identity—not as a separate trunk, but as a branch of the American tree, with roots in the broader experience—t...
But he said that his general optimism about the shape of American history remained unchanged. To be optimistic about the long-term trends of the United States doesn’t mean that everything is going to...
But even more, the changes have taught me how to best exploit that singular gift of study, to question what I see, then to question what I see after that, because the questions matter as much, perhaps...
But any investigation into the actual details revealed that the ladders themselves were not equal—that to be a member of the black race in America had specific, quantifiable consequences. Not only did...
Breathing. I just dream of breathing
Black people love their children with a kind of obsession. You are all we have, and you come to us endangered. I think we would like to kill you ourselves before seeing you killed by the streets that...