The meek shall inherit the earth meant nothing to me. The meek were battered in West Baltimore, stomped out at Walbrook Junction, bashed up on Park Heights, and raped in the showers of the city jail....
The crews, the young men who’d transmuted their fear into rage, were the greatest danger. The crews walked the blocks of their neighborhood, loud and rude, because it was only through their loud ruden...
No matter was the professional talkers tell you, I never met a black boy who wanted to fail.
I have raised you to respect every human being as singular, and you must extend that same respect into the past. Slavery is not an indefinable mass of flesh. It is particular, specific enslaved woman,...
For that more ennobling narrative, as for much of American history, the fact of black people is a problem.
But Donald Trump arrived in the wake of something more potent—an entire nigger presidency with nigger health care, nigger climate accords, nigger justice reform that could be targeted for destruction,...
Before the president spoke, George Zimmerman was arguably the most reviled man in America. After the president spoke, Zimmerman became the patron saint of those who believe that an apt history of raci...
And my eyes—my beautiful, precious eyes—were growing stronger each day. And I saw that what divided me from the world was not anything intrinsic to us but the actual injury done by people intent on na...
And for so long I have wanted to escape into the Dream, to fold my country over my head like a blanket. But this has never been an option because the Dream rests on our backs, the bedding made from ou...
Love could be soft and understanding; that, soft or hard, love was an act of heroism. And I could no longer predict where I would find my heroes.
It was slavery that allowed American democracy to exist in the first place. It was slavery that gifted much of the South with a working class that lived outside of all protections and could be driven,...
Time would come when gold would outweigh blood. But this was still Virginia of old, where a dubious God held that those who would offer a man for sale were somehow more honorable than those who effect...
Think of your mother, who had no father. And your grandmother, who was abandoned by her father. And your grandfather, who was left behind by his father. And think of how Prince's daughter was now draf...
These were notes on how to write, and thus notes on how to think.
These are all fine and applicable, but they understate the task and allow the citizens of this country to pretend that there is real distance between their own attitudes and those of the ones appointe...
There was nothing holy or particular in my skin; I was black because of history and heritage. There was no nobility in falling, in being bound, in living oppressed, and there was no inherent meaning i...
The fact of history is that black people have not -- probably no people have ever -- liberated themselves strictly through their own efforts. In every great change in the lives of African Americans we...
The black people in these films seemed to love the worst things in life—love the dogs that rent their children apart, the tear gas that clawed at their lungs, the fire-hoses that tore off their clothe...
Plunder has matured into habit and addiction; the people who could author the mechanized death of our ghettos, the mass rape of private prisons, then engineer their own forgetting, must inevitably plu...
Or l'insécurité ne fait que mettre des bornes à ta perception de la galaxie.