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...
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 plunder of black life was drilled into this country in its infancy and reinforced across its history, so that plunder has become an heirloom, an intelligence, a sentience, a default setting
The notion that the Tea Party represented the righteous, if unfocused, anger of an aggrieved class allowed everyone from leftists to neoliberals to white nationalists to avoid a horrifying and simple...
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 mettle that it takes to look away from the horror of our prison system, from police forces transformed into armies, from the long war against the black body, is not forged overnight. This is the p...
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.
The four million enslaved bodies, at the start of the Civil War, represented an inconceivable financial interest—$75 billion in today’s dollars—and the cotton that passed through their hands represent...
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 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 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...