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...
Elijah Forrester, a Democratic congressman from Georgia, opposed the Eisenhower administration’s 1956 civil rights bill on the grounds that where segregation has been abolished, black villainy soon pr...
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 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 all the magic I wanted was on the page. And when I looked closely, when I began to study, I did not even see magic, so much as a machinery so elegant, so wondrous, so imaginative as to seem supern...
Before I could discover, before I could escape, I had to survive, and this could only mean a clash with the streets, by which I mean not just physical blocks, nor simply the people packed into them, b...
At this moment the phrase police reform has come into vogue, and the actions of our publicly appointed guardians have attracted attention presidential and pedestrian. You may have heard the talk of di...
As for now, it must be said that the process of washing the disparate tribes white, the elevation of the belief in being white, was not achieved through wine tastings and ice cream socials, but rather...
Art was not an after-school special. Art was not motivational speaking. Art was not sentimental. It had no responsibility to be hopeful or optimistic or make anyone feel better about the world. It mus...
And we were all aware that the forces that held back our bodies back at home were not unrelated to those that had given France its wealth. We were aware that much of what they had done was built on th...
And now the lies of the Civil War and the lies of these post-racial years began to resonate with each other, and I could now see history, awful and undead, reaching out from the grave.
And godless though I am, the fact of being human, the fact of possessing the gift of study, and thus being remarkable among all the matter floating through the cosmos, still awes me.
And I was sorry that I had never felt this particular loneliness before—that I had never felt myself so far outside of someone else’s dream. Now I felt the deeper weight of my generational chains—my b...
And I remember that I have come to bring you back, in the full ambition that it is you who will bring all of us back. What have you discovered here, Shuri?
An America that asks what it owes its most vulnerable citizens is improved and humane. An America that looks away is ignoring not just the sins of the past but the sins of the present and the certain...
Among the people in that room, all those centuries ago, my body, breakable at will, endangered in the streets, fearful in the schools, was not closest to the queen’s but to her adviser’s, who’d been b...
After these readings, I followed as the poets would stand out on U Street or repair to a café and argue about everything—books, politics, boxing. And their arguments reinforced the discordant traditio...
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 families are better off the stronger and more stable they are is self-evidently important. But so is the notion that no family can ever be made impregnable, that families are social structures ex...
Sometimes it is subtle—the simple observation of who lives where and works what jobs and who does not. Sometimes it’s all of it at once. I have never asked how you became personally aware of the dista...