The episode embarrassed the Obama administration, but it also pointed to the great power of white innocence-the need to believe that whatever might befall the country, white America is ultimately blam...
The enslaved were not bricks in your road, and their lives were not chapters in your redemptive history. They were people turned to fuel for the American machine.
The election of Donald Trump confirmed everything I knew of my country and none of what I could accept. The idea that America would follow its first black president with Donald Trump accorded with its...
The destroyers will rarely be held accountable. Mostly they will receive pensions. And destruction is merely the superlative form of a dominion whose prerogatives include friskings, detainings, beatin...
The crude communal myth about black men is that we are in some manner unavailable to black women—either jailed, dead, gay, or married to white women. A corollary myth posits a direct and negative rela...
The civil rights generation is exiting the American stage—not in a haze of nostalgia but in a cloud of gloom, troubled by the persistence of racism, the apparent weaknesses of the generation following...
The Civil War is a story for white people—acted out by white people, on white people’s terms—in which blacks feature strictly as stock characters and props.
That was 1986. That year I felt myself to be drowning in the news reports of murder. I was aware that these murders very often did not land upon the intended targets but fell upon great-aunts, PTA mot...
That war was inaugurated not reluctantly, but lustily, by men who believed property in humans to be the cornerstone of civilization, to be an edict of God, and so delivered their own children to his m...
Southern whites also understood they were in a state of war, and subsequently turned the antebellum South into a police state.
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.
She said she thought the glory days of this country had long ago passed, and even those glory days were sullied: They had been built on the bodies of others. And we can’t get the message, she said. We...
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...
Seven years after I saw the pictures of those doors, I received my first adult passport. I wish I had come to it sooner.
Poetry aims for an economy of truth—loose and useless words must be discarded, and I found that these loose and useless words were not separate from loose and useless thoughts.
Perhaps the Irish too had once lost their bodies. Perhaps being named black had nothing to do with any of this; perhaps being named black was just someone’s name for being at the bottom, a human turne...
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 being named black had nothing to do with any of this; perhaps being named black was just someone’s name for being at the bottom, a human turned to object, object turned to pariah.