“The function of education is to teach one to think intensively and to think critically. Intelligence plus character—that is the goal of true education.” —Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.

If you’re at all sensitive

The further I drift from those Morehouse days, the more firmly I believe I’ll never experience anything else again like them. As I lived them, those days felt ordinary. But they were anything but.

So shoving what they believe to be a gift back in their faces can be unhealthy. It can

to the outside world, you realize you’re not just representing you.

I was perceptive enough to recognize the premium placed on assimilation, but too naive to see that its returns were

I believe that a Black experience—often traumatic and made more so by heinous historic and present-day crimes—provides a set of skills and tactics that can lead to victories in business, art, and science. If you can survive your Black experience, you have learned so much that is useful that cannot be taught or bought. I call this Black Magic.

Nobody used the tinny, nasally droning we sometimes forced to seem

Money controls all important decisions. The closer you sit to the money, the more valuable and safe you will be as an employee. Someone, somewhere is accounting for you as a human with a dollar amount attached to your name. That is your capitalist value. Your leverage (or lack thereof) can be reduced to that dollar amount. Be aware of it. In hard t