Sublime

Ask any Black student at Princeton or Black students at any peer institution the same, and the odds are quite good that the celebration of their admission was diminished by a claim of unearned benefit. “Affirmative action” is said with a sneer. It is a straw man of the right wing. Because of course college admissions are not an exercise in fairness

Before I was a real academic, I was a black woman and before I was a black woman I was a black girl. I was a certain kind of black girl. I am the only child of an only child who was the child of a woman whose grandparents had been touched by slavery. We are southern, almost pedestrianly so. We are the people who went north to Harlem but not west to

the papers of the Southern Conference Education Fund, is my mother talking in 1974 about the indigenous prison struggle, meaning Black Southerners recognizing that locking people up was a tool of social control.

Nnamdi Azikiwe was a miner in West Virginia, and as an activist in Nigeria, he stood with miners against colonial authorities.

The generations of freedom fighters in the Black Belt continue their work. And in Mississippi, they have made it the state with the most extensive Black political representation in America. It is the closest we have to a realization of full Black political citizenship. And it is the only state with a scion of Black nationalism as the executive of i

Cooper’s mom taught her “that dreaming is at the core of politics. If things are going to get better, Black women have to stay invested in the project of dreaming.” The kind of tenacity it takes to turn a blueprint into reality can look like a ridiculous flight of fancy to someone standing outside one’s dream.

In 1970, DC was 71.1 percent Black. In 2017, it was 47.1 percent Black. Chocolate City is slipping away. Just take a look at the astronomical real estate listings or the “revitalized” neighborhoods. There are no historic firsts, no grand gestures, no monuments or museums that undo generations of exclusions under law, policy, and practice, or that s

In a society where the good is defined in terms of profit rather than in terms of human need, there must always be some group of people who, through systematized oppression, can be made to feel surplus, to occupy the place of the dehumanized inferior.