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 these progressives rarely note that Roosevelt's New Deal, much like the democracy that produced it, rested on the foundation of Jim Crow. The Jim Crow South, writes Ira Katznelson, a history and...
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 some time ago I rejected magic in all its forms. This rejection was a gift from your grandparents, who never tried to console me with ideas of an afterlife and were skeptical of preordained Americ...
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 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 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...
But all the magic I wanted was on the page. And when I looked closely, when I began to study, I did not even see magic, so much as a machinery so elegant, so wondrous, so imaginative as to seem supern...
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...
At football games the other students would cheer the star black running back, and then when a black player on the other team got the ball, they’d yell, Kill that nigger! Kill that nigger! They would y...
As much a series of actions as a state of being, a constant questioning, questioning as ritual, questioning as exploration rather than the search for certainty.
As for now, it must be said that the process of washing the disparate tribes white, the elevation of the belief in being white, was not achieved through wine tastings and ice cream socials, but rather...
And hell upon those who tell us to be twice as good and shoot us no matter.
And I knew that there were children born into these same caged neighborhoods on the Westside, these ghettos, each of which was planned as any subdivision. They are an elegant act of racism, killing fi...
And I felt, even in this time, a century later, that I too would gather my words and scream into the roaring waves, because to scream was to defy the story, and that defiance had meaning, no matter th...
An equality that requires blacks to be twice as good is not equality - it's a double standard.
Among us the poor white laborer is respected as an equal. His family is treated with kindness, consideration and respect. He does not belong to the menial class. The negro is in no sense of the term h...