Sublime

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.

The United States, with less than 5 percent of the global population, has almost 25 percent of the world’s prisoners. One in nine black men between twenty and thirty-four is behind bars. This has effectively decapitated the leadership in the inner cities, where African Americans have traditionally had to react more quickly to confront social injust

I left my car at work, ran to my apartment, did some push-ups, weighed myself, ran six miles around Poughkeepsie, came back home, locked the bedroom door, did more push-ups, said prayers, got in bed, and accepted no matter how much weight I lost, small, smart white boys would always have the power to make big black boys force them into buying our l

Marcelin Albert

W. E. B. Du Bois taught us this, and we teach it to our students. Whiteness was offered as a promise. Precarity makes it less sturdy. There are White people who work hard all of their lives and Whiteness gives them little materially. On the other hand, there are White people who come from powerful edifices, who can point to paintings on Vanderbilt’

I said, “Son, these are our people.” He said, “These are our people? Is this today?” He could not wrap his eight-year-old mind around it. He began to weep because he could not reconcile the idea of slavery in today’s age.