I've always looked at America like a foster mother doing it only for the check. At any minute, I just knew she'd be ready to give up on me.
Without the presence of black people in America, European-Americans would not be white-- they would be Irish, Italians, Poles, Welsh, and other engaged in class, ethnic, and gender struggles over reso...
You were born into a society which spelled out with brutal clarity, and in as many ways as possible, that you were a worthless human being. You were not expected to aspire to excellence: you were expe...
Through The Mecca I saw that we were, in our own segregated body politic, cosmopolitans. The black diaspora was not just our own world but, in so many ways, the Western world itself. Now, the heirs of...
How stupid she had been ever to have thought that she could marry and perhaps have children in a land where every dark child was handicapped at the start by the shroud of color! She saw, suddenly, the...
It's just like when you've got some coffee that's too black, which means it's too strong. What do you do? You integrate it with cream, you make it weak. But if you pour too much cream in it, you won't...
There are no racists in America, or at least none that the people who need to be white know personally.
Those white things have taken all I had or dreamed, she said, and broke my heartstrings too. There is no bad luck in the world but whitefolks.
By the time I visited those battlefields, I knew that they had been retrofitted as the staging ground for a great deception, and this was my only security, because they could no longer insult me by ly...
I remember reading article about the woman in that Oakland neighborhood who lost all her children to violence. I wondered why'd she keep living there after the first one was killed. Didn't she care ab...
Today even the attitude of the Southern whites toward the blacks is not, as so many assume, in all cases the same; the ignorant Southerner hates the Negro, the workingmen fear his competition, the mon...
Three hundred years of humiliation, abuse and deprivation cannot be expected to find voice in a whisper.
Perhaps it now occurs to him that in this need to establish himself in his relation to his past [the African American] is most American, that this depthless alienation from oneself and one's people is...
In the context of the Negro problem neither whites nor blacks, for excellent reasons of their own, have the faintest desire to look back; but I think that the past is all that makes the present cohere...
The election of Donald Trump confirmed everything I knew of my country and none of what I could accept. The idea that America would follow its first black president with Donald Trump accorded with its...
The black world was expanding before me, and I could see now that that world was more than a photonegative of that of the people who believe they are white. White America is a syndicate arrayed to pro...
Our teacher says we're supposed to be colorblind. That's hard to do if you can see color, isn't it?Yeah, I'd say so, but I think your teacher means don't make any assumptions based on color.Cross on t...
The people who think of themselves as White have the choice of becoming human or irrelevant.Or--as they are, indeed, already, in all but actual fact: obsolete. For, if trouble don't last always, as th...
Race is there. You're tire of hearing about it? Imagine how fucking exhausting it is living it.
Alone, we are great, but together, we are better.