Very few Americans will directly proclaim that they are in favor of black people being left to the streets. But a very large number of Americans will do all they can to preserve the Dream.
Two men are forever warring within me-- the man I am called to be, and the man I truly am. I am called to be regal, irreproachable, and all-knowing. That is the mask. That is the king. But I am, in my...
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 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 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 forgetting is habit, is yet another necessary component of the Dream. They have forgotten the scale of theft that enriched them in slavery; the terror that allowed them, for a century, to pilfer t...
The first black president found that he was personally toxic to the GOP base. An entire political party was organized around the explicit aim of negating Obama. It was thought by Obama and others that...
The election of Donald Trump confirmed everything I knew of my country and none of what I could accept.
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...
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 can hope for more. She can imagine some future for her grandchildren. But when she dies, the world—which is really the only world she can ever know—ends. For this woman, enslavement is not a parab...
Prison presented a solution: jobs for whites, and warehousing for blacks. Mass incarceration widened the income gap between white and black Americans,
Pointing to citizens who voted for both Obama and Trump does not disprove racism; it evinces it. To secure the White House, Obama needed to be a Harvard-trained lawyer with a decade of political exper...
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
One must be without error out here. Walk in 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....
One cannot, at once, claim to be superhuman and then plead mortal error. I propose to take our countrymen’s claims of American exceptionalism seriously, which is to say I propose subjecting our countr...
Obama’s keynote address conflated the slave and the nation of immigrants who profited from him. To reinforce the majoritarian dream, the nightmare endured by the minority is erased. That is the tradit...
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...