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 in any slave ship. Or perhaps I was, because so much of what I'd felt in Baltimore, the sharp hatred, the immortal wish, and the timeless will, I saw in Hayden's work. And that was what I he...
I have never seen a contradiction between calling for reparations and calling for a living wage, on calling for legitimate law enforcement and single-payer health care. They are related—but cannot sta...
Anyone can make a baby, but it takes a man to be a father.
And I knew then that I had failed. And I remembered that I had expected to fail.
There isn't a dude outside my dad who had greater influence on my life.
My belief is in the chaos of the world and that you have to find your peace within the chaos and that you still have to find some sort of mission.
When you read a comic book, there's a space between what's happening on the panel and what you have to literally see in your mind. That's not true of movies, where you see everything.
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...
We would prefer to say that such people cannot exist, that there aren't any, writes Solzhenitsyn. To do evil a human being must first of all believe that what he's doing is good, or else that it's a w...
Our teachers urged us toward the example of freedom marchers, Freedom Riders, and Freedom Summers, and it seemed that the month could not pass without a series of films dedicated to the glories of bei...
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.
Americans deify democracy in a way that allows for a dim awareness that they have, from time to time, stood in defiance of their God. But democracy is a forgiving God and America's heresies—torture, t...
Whenever a woman smiled his way, she'd already begun dividing her life into trimesters.
There were honeys from across the city - Westport, Hollander Ridge, Gwynn Oak, Northwood. They were everything from redbone to yo-yo darkskin. The dimes among them carried Benetton bags, were dolled u...
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 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 did not want to raise you in fear or false memory. I did not want you forced to mask your joys and bind your eyes. What I wanted for you was to grow into consciousness. I resolved to hide nothing fr...
But one reason Obama rose so quickly was that African Americans are war-weary. It was not simply the country at large that was tired of the old baby boomer debates. Blacks, too, were sick of talking a...
This is your country, this is your world, this is your body, and you must find some way to live within the all of it.