Specifically, the host wished to know why I felt that white America’s progress, or rather the progress of those Americans who believe that they are white, was built on looting and violence. Hearing th...
Some of the other students were out on the grass in front of Alain Locke Hall, in pink and green, chanting, singing, stomping, clapping, stepping.
Slavery, Jim Crow, segregation: These bonded white people into a broad aristocracy united by the salient fact of unblackness.
Slavery is not an undefinable mass of flesh. It is a particular, specific enslaved woman, whose mind is active as your own, whose range of feeling is as vast as your own; who prefers the way the light...
Should assaulting an officer of the state be a capital offense, rendered without trial, with the officer as judge and executioner? Is that what we wish civilization to be? And all the time the Dreamer...
She was teaching me how to ruthlessly interrogate the subject that elicited the most sympathy and rationalizing—myself. Here was the lesson: I was not an innocent. My impulses were not filled with unf...
She knew that I had no idea how close I was, would always be, to the edge, how easily boys like me were erased in absurd, impractical ways. One minute we were tossing snowballs at taxis, firing up in...
She had never known her father, which put her in the company of the greater number of everyone I'd known. I felt then that these men - these 'fathers' - were the greatest of cowards. But I also felt t...
Power was what mattered, and what characterized the differences between black and white America was not a difference in work ethic, but a system engineered to place one on top of the other
Perhaps that was, is, the hope of the movement: to awaken the Dreamers, to rouse them to the facts of what their need to be white, to talk like they are white, to think that they are white, which is t...
Perhaps after a serious discussion and debate - the kind that HR 40 proposes - we may find that the country can never fully repay African Americans. But we stand to discover much about ourselves in su...
Over the next twelve years, I came to regard Obama as a skilled politician, a deeply moral human being, and one of the greatest presidents in American history. He was phenomenal—the most agile interpr...
Our current politics tell you that should you fall victim to such an assault and lose your body, it must somehow be your fault. Trayvon Martin’s hoodie got him killed. Jordan Davis’s loud music did th...
Ororo, I asked you to come because you are my best friend, and because... Because some things, my king, are easier to annual than others.
Obama himself, underestimating Trump and thus underestimating the power of whiteness, believed the Republican nominee too objectionable to actually win. In this Obama was, tragically, wrong. And so th...
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...
Never forget that we were enslaved in this country longer than we have been free. Never forget that for 250 years black people were born into chains—whole generations followed by more generations who...
My work is to give you what I know of my own particular path while allowing you to walk your own.
My wish for you is that you feel no need to constrict yourself to make other people comfortable.
My understanding of the world was physical, and its moral arc bent toward chaos then concluded in a box.