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 FHA had adopted a system of maps that rated neighborhoods according to their perceived stability. On the maps, green areas, rated A, indicated in demand neighborhoods that, as one appraiser put it...
That was the week you learned that the killers of Michael Brown would go free. The men who had left his body in the street like some awesome declaration of their inviolable power would never be punish...
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...
Struggle for the memory of your ancestors. Struggle for wisdom. Struggle for the warmth of The Mecca. Struggle for your grandmother and grandfather, for your name. But do not struggle for the Dreamers...
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...
Seven years after I saw the pictures of those doors, I received my first adult passport. I wish I had come to it sooner.
Prison presented a solution: jobs for whites, and warehousing for blacks. Mass incarceration widened the income gap between white and black Americans,
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 struggle is all we have because the god of history is an atheist, and nothing about his world is meant to be. So you must wake up every morning knowing that no promise is unbreakable, least of...
Perhaps our triumphs are not even the point. Perhaps struggle is all we have because the god of history is an atheist, and nothing about his world is meant to be. So
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.
Part of me thinks that your very vulnerability brings you closer to the meaning of life, just as for others, the quest to believe oneself white divides them from it. The fact is that despite their dre...
One must be without error out here. Walk in a single file. Work quietly. Pack an extra number 2 pencil. Make no mistakes. But you are human and you will make mistakes. You will misjudge. You will yell...
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...
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.
Keep your end of the yard clean and leave the justice to the Lord.
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.
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...