I kept thinking about how southern Manhattan had always been Ground Zero for us. They auctioned our bodies down there, in that same devastated, and rightly named, financial district. And there was onc...
I judged them against the country I knew, which had acquired the land through murder and tamed it under slavery,
I have no praise anthems, nor old Negro spirituals. The spirit and soul are the body and brain, which are destructible—that is precisely why they are so precious.
I have missed seeing you like this, brother. And how is that? At war.
I had never seen a black man like Barack Obama. He talked to white people in a new language—as though he actually trusted them and believed in them. It was not my language.
I had come looking for a parade, for a military review of champions marching in ranks. Instead I was left with a brawl of ancestors, a herd of dissenters, sometimes marching together but just as often...
I had believed myself superior to my ancestors. But all it took was the proper amount of pain for me to return to the traditions of old. For even thinking such a thing, I am sorry. I apologize to you...
I fell back on the old habits and logic of the street, where it was so often necessary to deny humiliation and transmute pain into rage. So I took the agony of that era like a collection notice and hi...
I did not die in my aimless youth. I did not perish in the agony of not knowing. I was not jailed. I had proven to myself that there was another way beyond the schools and the streets. I felt myself t...
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 over...
I am Damisa-sakri. And there is no escape. Not for my enemies. Not for my people. Not for my mother. Not for me. So much rage. So much hate. I must master all of it. I must not let it master me.
I also saw that those charged with analyzing the import of Obama's blackness were, in the main, working off of an old script. Obama was dubbed The new Tiger Woods of American Politics, as a man who wa...
How many awful poems did I write thinking of her? I know now what she was to me - the first glimpse of a space-bridge, a wormhole, a galactic portal of this bound and blind planet. She had seen other...
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 the White House 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 father...
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...
Elijah Forrester, a Democratic congressman from Georgia, opposed the Eisenhower administration’s 1956 civil rights bill on the grounds that where segregation has been abolished, black villainy soon pr...
Cube’s album Death Certificate: Let me live my life, if we can no longer live our life, then let us give our life for the liberation and salvation of the black nation.
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.