My reclamation would be accomplished, like Malcom's, through books, through my own study and exploration. Perhaps I might write something of consequence someday. I had been reading and writing beyond...
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 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 like falling in love—the things that get you are so small, the things that keep you up at night are so particular to you that when you try to explain, the only reward anyone can give you is a d...
It struck me that perhaps the defining feature of being drafted into the black race was the inescapable robbery of time, because the moments we spent readying the mask, or readying ourselves to accept...
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 could only be the employment of carriage whips, tongs, iron pokers, handsaws, stones, paperweights, or whatever might be handy to break the black body, the black family, the black community, the bl...
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...
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 was freed to truly consider how I wished to live—specifically, how do I live free in this black body? It is a profound question because America understands itself as God’s handiwork, but the black b...
I wanted to learn to write, which was ultimately, still, as my mother had taught me, a confrontation with my own innocence, my own rationalizations. Poetry was the processing of my thoughts until the...
I thought back on the sit-ins, the protestors with their stoic faces, the ones I'd once scorned for hurling their bodies at the worst things in life. Perhaps they had known something terrible about th...
I sought a world where peasants and kings were as brothers. But what new world was ever made without the sword? Now I am old, and I fear that some young dreamer shall resolve my contradiction, and com...
I should never have left you. I was caught between fealty to my world and fealty to my blood. I chose wrong. I was a king. I held the knife. I acted as a king should. But I did not act as family shoul...
I sensed the schools were hiding something, drugging us with false morality so that we would not see, so that we did not ask: Why--for us and only us--is the other side of free will and free spirits a...
I love you, and I love the world, and I love it more with every new inch I discover. But you are a black boy, and you must be responsible for your body in a way that other boys cannot know. Indeed, yo...
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 have missed seeing you like this, brother. And how is that? At war.
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.