The Nickel Boys

We haven’t outrun or outlived the plantation, although it looks a little bit different. Now the fugitives are from Central America, and the unfree laborers are in prison. Some kids are still hungry, even so many years after the breakfast programs and Head Start and all of the gains fought for by Black elected officials, because the gag is in the mo

That was the week you learned that the killers of Michael Brown would go free. The men who had left his body in the street like some awesome declaration of their inviolable power would never be punished.

He said that those who have endured some misfortune will always be set apart but that it is just that misfortune which is their gift and which is their strength and that they must make their way back into the common enterprise of man for without they do so it cannot go forward and they themselves will wither in bitterness.

And in our lives, an intimate détente remains. A polite tension on top, a flame below. This might sound unfamiliar to you, but if you think for a moment about how conversations about race are approached in your life, the tentativeness and the terror that the conflagration might hit, you’ll see it’s much the same. Shame and rage collide. You might n