It pained me. I was of the age when it was natural to seek out a wife, but by then I had seen tasking women promised to tasking men, and then seen how such promises were kept. I remember how these you...
It struck me that perhaps the defining feature of being drafted into the black race was the inescapable robbery of time, because the moments we spent readying the mask, or readying ourselves to accept...
It was how I’d felt seeing Barack and Michelle during the inauguration, the car slow-dragging down Pennsylvania Avenue, the crowd cheering, and then the two of them rising up out of the limo, rising u...
It was like falling in love—the things that get you are so small, the things that keep you up at night are so particular to you that when you try to explain, the only reward anyone can give you is a d...
It was only after you that I understood the grip of my mother's hand. She knew the galaxy itself could kill me, that all of me could be shattered and all of her legacy spilled upon the curb like bum w...
It was the program from her ceremony, and on the side was a love note that I could not recognize as such. It was written in that vague, noncommittal way of a girl who wants you to know what she feels...
It was the scientist in me, you see. It was the desire to see all the everything beyond the Golden City. To escape the sycophants, the provincial. The hunger to know. It is my greatest weapon. But the...
It’s a cruel thing to do to children, to raise them as though they are siblings, and then set them against each other so that one shall be queen and the other shall be a footstool.
Keep your end of the yard clean and leave the justice to the Lord.
Mistakes were made. Bodies were broken. People were enslaved. We meant well. We tried our best. Good intention is a hall pass through history, a sleeping pill that ensures the Dream.
My reclamation would be accomplished, like Malcom's, through books, through my own study and exploration. Perhaps I might write something of consequence someday. I had been reading and writing beyond...
My understanding of the universe was physical, and its moral arc bent toward chaos then concluded in a box.
My understanding of the world was physical, and its moral arc bent toward chaos then concluded in a box.
My wish for you is that you feel no need to constrict yourself to make other people comfortable.
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...
Not being violent enough could cost me my body. Being too violent could cost me my body.
Nothing between us was ever planned - not even you. We were both twenty-four years old when you were born, the normal age for most Americans, but among the class we found ourselves, we ranked as teena...
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...
Obama was born into a country where laws barring his very conception—let alone his ascendancy to the presidency—had long stood in force. A black president would always be a contradiction for a governm...
One cannot, at once, claim to be superhuman and then plead mortal error.
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