I know now that that hunger is a retreat from the knotty present into myth and that what ultimately awaits those who retreat into fairy tales, who seek refuge in the mad pursuit to be made great again...
I judged them against the country I knew, which had acquired the land through murder and tamed it under slavery, against the country whose armies fanned out across the world to extend their dominion....
I heard the fear in the first music I ever knew, the music that pumped from boom boxes full of grand boast and bluster. The boys...loved this music because it told them, against all evidence and odds,...
I have searched for answers in nationalist myth, in classrooms, out on the streets, and on other continents. The question is unanswerable, which is not to say futile. The greatest reward of this const...
I had not yet been to Gettysburg. I had not read Thavolia Glymph. All I had was the feeling, the weight. I did not yet know, and I do not fully know now. But part of what I know ist hat there is the b...
I felt that I had crossed some threshold, out of the foyer of my life and into the living room. Everything that was the past seemed to be another life. There was before you, and then there was after,...
I did not know then that this is what life is - just when you master the geometry of one world, it slips away, and suddenly again, you're swarmed by strange shapes and impossible angles.
He counseled vigilance, because the possibility of abuse by government officials always exists. The issue is not going to be that there are new tools available; the issue is making sure that the incom...
For now the country holds to the common theory that emancipation and civil rights were redemptive, a fraught and still-incomplete resolution of the accidental hypocrisy of a nation founded by slavehol...
Even the Dreamers, lost in their great reverie, feel it, for it’s Billie they reach for in sadness, and Isley they hum in love, and Dre they yell in revelry, and Aretha the last sound they hear before...
Enslaved' is what the plunderer does to a righteous woman. But a slave is a righteous woman who has accepted the plunderer's law. And not even the righteous have the power to grant such acceptance. Fr...
Debating Abraham Lincoln during the race for a U.S. Senate seat in Illinois in 1858, Stephen Douglas asserted that this government was made on the white basis and that the Framers had made no referenc...
By Obama’s lights, there was no liberal America, no conservative America, no black America, no white America, no Latino America, no Asian America, only the United States of America. All these disparat...
But you are a black boy, and you must be responsible for your body in a way that other boys cannot know. Indeed, you must be responsible for the worst actions of other black bodies, which, somehow, wi...
But what I remember most is the sense of impossibility with which Obama regarded the Trump presidency. I confess to basically feeling the same. It seemed to me that white people, if only out of an ins...
But this banality of violence can never excuse America, because America makes no claim to the banal. America believes itself exceptional, the greatest and noblest nation ever to exist, a lone champion...
But rather through the pillaging of life, liberty, labor, and land; through the flaying of backs; the chaining of limbs; the strangling of dissidents; the destruction of families.
But now I understand the gravity of what I was proposing—that a four-year-old child be watchful, prudent, and shrewd, that I curtail your happiness, that you submit to a loss of time. And now when I m...
But my experience in this world has been that the people who believe themselves to be white are obsessed with the politics of personal exoneration. And the word racist, to them, conjures, if not a tob...
But more than any shame I feel about my own actual violence, my greatest regret was that in seeking to defend you I was, in fact, endangering you. I could have you arrested, he said. Which is to say,...