I would not have you descend into your own dream. I would have you be a conscious citizen of this terrible and beautiful world.
To celebrate freedom and democracy while forgetting American’s origins in a slavery economy is patriotism à la carte.
Barack Obama’s victories in 2008 and 2012 were dismissed by some of his critics as merely symbolic for African Americans. But there is nothing “mere” about symbols.
The spirit and soul are the body and brain, which are destructible-that is precisely why they are so precious.
I came to see the streets and the schools as the arms of the same beast. One enjoyed the official power of the state while the other enjoyed its implicit sanction. But fear and violence were the weaponry of both.
Anyone can make a baby, but it takes a man to be a father.
You do not give your precious body to the billy clubs of Birmingham sheriffs, nor to the insidious activity of the streets.
To question what I see, then to question what I see after that, because the questions matter as much, perhaps more than, the answers.
You are growing into consciousness, and my wish for you is that you feel no need to constrict yourself to make other people comfortable.
Mostly they all were products of single parents, and in the most tragic category – black boys, with no particular criminal inclinations but whose very lack of direction put them in the crosshairs of the world.
Remember your name. Remember that you and I are brothers, are the children of trans-Atlantic rape. Remember the broader consciousness that comes with that. Remember that this consciousness can never ultimately be racial; it must be cosmic
I thank my mother (Ma, you’re only second cause you got the dedication), who used to make me write essays whenever I got into trouble, explaining exactly what I’d done and why I’d done it.
My work is to give you what I know of my own particular path while allowing you to walk your own.
You and I, my son, are that “below.” That was true in 1776. It is true today. There is no them without you, and without the right to break you they must necessarily fall from the mountain, lose their divinity, and tumble out of the Dream.
There are no racists in America, or at least none that the people who need to be white know personally.
Racism is not merely a simplistic hatred. It is, more often, broad sympathy toward some and broader skepticism toward others…
America’s indispensable working class existed as property beyond the realm of politics, leaving white Americans free to trumpet their love of freedom and democratic values.
The popular mocking of reparations as a harebrained scheme authored by wild-eyed lefties and intellectually unserious black nationalists is fear masquerading as laughter.
I did not tell you it would be okay because I never believed it would be okay.
Some of us make it out. But the game is played with loaded dice. I wish I had known more, and I wished I had known it sooner.
Racism is, among other things, the unearned skepticism of one group of humans joined to the unearned sympathy for another.
I should not mistake her calm probing for the absence of anger.
Dad had turned conservative, but not in the way of the demonologists who sold us out for tenure and crumbs. More like a man who spurns the false talk of revolution for the humbler mission of resurrecting one soul at a time.
The Knowledge Rule 2080: From maggots to men, the world is a corner bully. Better you knuckle up and go for yours than have to bow your head and tuck your chain.
I don’t so much hope that any reader “agrees” with me, as I hope to haunt them, to trouble their sense of how things actually are.
Serious history was the West, and the West was white.
On our life map, he drew a bright circle around twelve through eighteen. This was the abyss where, unguided, black boys were swallowed whole, only to reemerge on corners and prison tiers.
Never forget that we were enslaved in this country longer than we have been free. Never forget that for 250 years black people were born into chains-whole generations followed by more generations who knew nothing but chains.
What did I know of loving anything, beyond a longing, beyond being biased in one woman’s direction.
The last slaveholder has been dead for a very long time. The last soldier to endure Valley Forge has been dead much longer. To proudly claim the veteran and disown the slaveholder is patriotism à la carte.
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.
No matter was the professional talkers tell you, I never met a black boy who wanted to fail.
I found that the same softness which once made me a target now compelled people to trust me with their stories.
i think one has to even abandon the phrase “ally” and understand that you are not helping someone in a particular struggle; the fight is yours.
This is one of those stories where the feeling of the moment stands in for visual details.
The universe was playing with loaded dice, which insured an excess of cowards in our ranks.
In a country authored and sustained by criminal irresponsibility.
I was made for the library, not the classroom. The classroom was a jail of other people’s interests. The library is open, unending, free.
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.
When I see the Confederate flag, I see the attempt to raise an empire in slavery. It really, really is that simple. I don’t understand how anybody with any sort of education on the Civil War can see anything else.
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.
One of the things we tell ourselves as African-Americans is if we work hard, play by the rules, we do start back a little ways, but if we can be twice as good, somehow we can escape history and heritage and legacy.
There was no United States before slavery. I am sure somebody can make some sort of argument about modern French identity and slavery and North Africa, but there simply is no American history before black people.
There are African-American families around this country – a large, large number of African-American families – that operate out of complete fear that their kids are going to be taken from them and will do anything to prevent that.
I feel sorry for people who only know comic books through movies. I really do.
Forgiveness is a big part of – especially post-civil rights movement – is a big part of African-American Christianity, and I wasn’t raised within the Christian church; I wasn’t raised within any church.
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.
Outside of hip-hop, it was in comics that I most often found the aesthetics and wisdom of my world reflected.
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.
You may not be able to change the course of government, but you can achieve some peace. And books were the path to that. I grew up in a house where books were everywhere.
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.
There isn’t a dude outside my dad who had greater influence on my life.