What I am saying is that it does not all belong to you, that the beauty in you is not strictly yours and is largely the result of enjoying an abnormal amount of security in your black body. Perhaps
We know who you are. We know of your battles with the king. We think you may well prove to be a true friend of our cause. But right now all we share are kind words and a common enemy. That is not yet...
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.
Unfit for the schools, and in good measure wanting to be unfit for them, and lacking the savvy I needed to master the streets, I felt there could be no escape for me or, honestly, anyone else. The fea...
To do evil a human being must first of all believe that what he’s doing is good, or else that it’s a well-considered act in conformity with natural law.’ This is the foundation of the Dream--its adher...
This was why your grandparents banned Tarzan and the Lone Ranger and toys with white faces from the house. They were rebelling against the history books that spoke of black people only as sentimental...
This is the practiced habit of jabbing out one’s eyes and forgetting the work of one’s hands. To
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.
They made us into a race. We made ourselves into a people. Here
They knew our names and they knew our parents. But they did not know us, because not knowing was essential to their power. To sell a child right from under his mother, you must know that mother only i...
There are no racists in America, or at least none that the people who need to be white know personally. In the era of mass lynching, it was so difficult to find who, specifically, served as executione...
The two great divisions of society are not the rich and poor, but white and black, said the great South Carolina senator John C. Calhoun. And all the former, the poor as well as the rich, belong to th...
The symbolic power of Barack Obama’s presidency—that whiteness was no longer strong enough to prevent peons from taking up residence in the castle—assaulted the most deeply rooted notions of white sup...
The spirit and soul are the body and brain, which are destructible - that is precisely why they are so precious. And the soul did not escape. The spirit did not steal away on gospel wings. The soul wa...
The scope of Trump’s commitment to whiteness is matched only by the depth of popular intellectual disbelief in it. We are now being told that support for Trump’s Muslim ban, his scapegoating of immigr...
The question with no answer. This is what you wished us to consider. But there was an answer. And you knew it. What is our remedy against the robber, who so broke into our house? We burn down the hous...
The promise of a cost-free escape from history should have made me suspicious. But what ultimately made me question the rising tide idea was not the theory itself but all the attendant theories that s...
The new people were something else before they were white—Catholic, Corsican, Welsh, Mennonite, Jewish—and if all our national hopes have any fulfillment, then they will have to be something else agai...
The masters could not bring water to boil, harness to horse or strap their own drawers without us. We were better than them. We had to be. Sloth was literal death for us, while for them it was the who...
The greatest reward of this constant interrogation, of confrontation with the brutality of my country, is that it has freed me from ghosts and girded me against the sheer terror of disembodiment.