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 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 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 is utterly impossible to conjure a black facsimile of Donald Trump—to imagine Obama, say, implicating an opponent’s father in the assassination of an American president or comparing his physical en...
It is as if the white tribe united in demonstration to say, If a black man can be president, then any white man—no matter how fallen—can be president.
It is a lie- one that makes your life of philosophy possible. We studied a lot together. And yet in all our time we never studied a single nation founded on truth and candor. My teachers were imaginat...
Instead, I fell back on the old habits and logic of the street, where it was so often necessary to deny humiliation and transmute pain into rage. So I took the agony of that era like a collection noti...
Indeed, in America there is a strange and powerful belief that if you stab a black person ten times, the bleeding stops and the healing begins the moment the assailant drops the knife. We believe whit...
In the Dream they are Buck Rogers, Prince Aragorn, an entire race of Skywalkers. To awaken them is to reveal that they are an empire of humans and, like all empires of humans, are built on the destruc...
In 1966, Richard Nixon picked up the charge, linking rising crime rates to Martin Luther King’s campaign of civil disobedience. The decline of law and order can be traced directly to the spread of the...
If he could se me here, S'yan would remind me that the handlers of these men are dictators, despots, and strongmen. That their peace is the peace of the dead. I am a king. And while they derive their...
I would imagine Malcolm, his body bound in a cell, studying the books, trading his human eyes for the power of flight. And I too felt bound by my ignorance, by the questions that I had not yet underst...
I wonder if this is it. If I have finally flown too far from home. I think of Ramonda and Ororo. Zuri and W'Kabi. Father and S'yan. But above all, I think of you. and I think of dying out here, of dri...
I wish, when I was back in that French class, that I had connected the conjugations, verbs, and gendered nouns to something grander. I wish someone had told me what that class really was—a gate to som...
I went into this investigation imagining history to be a unified narrative, free of debate, which, once uncovered, would simply verify everything I had always suspected. The smokescreen would lift...T...
I watched you leap and laugh with these children you barely knew, and the wall rose in me and I felt I should grab you by the arm, pull you back and say, ‘We don’t know these folks! Be cool!’ I did no...
I was learning to live in the disquiet I felt in Moorland-Spingarn, in the mess of my mind. The gnawing discomfort, the chaos, the intellectual vertigo was not an alarm. It was a beacon.
I took a seat. The garden was bursting with people, again in all their alien ways. At that moment a strange loneliness took hold. Perhaps it was that I had not spoken a single word of English that ent...
I tell you now that the question of how one should live within a black body, within a country lost in the Dream, is the question of my life, and the pursuit of this question, I have found, ultimately...
I saw it in the girls, in their loud laughter, in their gilded bamboo earrings that announced their names thrice over. And I saw it in their brutal language and hard gaze, how they would cut you with...