She had wanted her son to stand for what he believed and to be respectful. And he had died for believing his friends had a right to play their music loud, to be American teenagers.
It does not matter that the 'intentions' of individual educators were noble. Forget about intentions. What any institution, or its agents, 'intend' for you is secondary. Our world is physical. Learn t...
In a country authored and sustained by criminal irresponsibility.
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...
An unceasing interrogation of the stories told to us by the schools now felt essential. It felt wrong not to ask why, and then to ask it again. I took these questions to my father, who very often refu...
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...
Would rather live white than live free.
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...
We were laughing but I know that we were afraid of those who loved us most. Our parents resorted to the lash the way flagellants in the plague years resorted to the scourge… The law did not protect us...
To be black in the Baltimore of my youth was to be naked before the elements of the world, before all the guns, fists, knives, crack, rape, and disease. The nakedness is not an error, nor pathology. 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.
Some black people will always be twice as good. But they generally find white predation to be thrice as fast.
Schools did not reveal truths, they concealed them.
I am not a cynic. I love you, 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 kno...
Either you are a nation, or you are nothing.
These were notes on how to write, and thus notes on how to think.
Serious history was the West, and the West was white.
In April 1865, the United States was faced with a discomfiting reality: It had seen 2 percent of its population destroyed because a section of its citizenry would countenance anything to protect, and...