They were people turned to fuel for the American machine. Enslavement was not destined to end, and it is wrong to claim our present
There is a notion out there that black people enjoy the Sisyphean struggle against racism. In fact, most of us live for the day when we can struggle against anything else. But having been, by that ver...
Should assaulting an officer of the state be a capital offense, rendered without trial, with the officer as judge and executioner? Is that what we wish civilization to be?
Nothing in the record of human history argues for divine morality, and a great deal argues against it. What we know is that good people very often suffer terribly, while the perpetrators of horrific e...
Anyone can make a baby, but it takes a man to be a father.
My father was so very afraid. I felt it in the sting of his black leather belt, which he applied with more anxiety than anger, my father who beat me as if someone might steal me away, because that was...
Superheroes are best imagined in comic books. The union between the written word, the image, and then what your imagination has to do to connect those allows for so much.
This story began, as all writing must, in failure.
The pursuit of knowing was freedom to me,
My enlightened racial consciousness demands that I reject the so-called greatness of William Faulkner and William Shakespeare. I don't have time for any of that Hamlet jive -- but Marvel superheroes a...
He was born-again, a state I did not share but respected.
Fail in the streets and the crews would catch you slipping and take your body. Fail in the schools and you would be suspended and sent back to those same streets, where they would take your body. And...
In those days I imagined racism as a tumor that could be isolated and removed from the body of America, not as a pervasive system both native and essential to that body. From that perspective, it seem...
I was not always a believer in reparations. I’d read TransAfrica founder Randall Robinson’s work on the subject in the late ’90s, which convinced me that the negative conditions of black people were t...
I didn't start off as a journalist; I started off as a poet. My ambition was to practise poetry. Then I found journalism, but that other voice never fled from me.
Outside of hip-hop, it was in comics that I most often found the aesthetics and wisdom of my world reflected.
… writing is always some form of interpretation, some form of translating the specificity of one’s roots or expertise or even one’s own mind into language that can be absorbed and assimilated into the...
Mais une société qui en protège certains par un filet invisible d'écoles, d'emprunts immobiliers subventionnés, de richesses accumulées, et ne consent à t'offrir que la protection d'une justice crimin...
I have no God to hold me up. And I believe that when they shatter the body they shatter everything, and I knew that all of us—Christians, Muslims, atheists—lived in this fear of this truth.
Even then, I was dreaming of Raistlin's black robes one moment, and Dorsett's spin move the next. This was what my father deeded--that our Knowledge of Self be more than America, that we understand th...