Racism

What it means to decolonize a thing that is not literally colonized varies considerably. It can refer simply to including scholars of all nationalities and races: this is the primary focus of the United Kingdom’s National Union of Students (NUS) campaigns, “Why is My Curriculum White?” (2015) and #LiberateMyDegree (2016).23 Such campaigns focus on

Perhaps you’ve known that person who devours beauty as if it belongs to them. It is a possessive wonder. It eats not to delight but to collect, trade, and boast. It consumes beauty to grow in ego, not in love. It climbs mountains to gain ownership, not to gain freedom.

Neither of these individuals are saying that we should not be working with organizations, businesses, governments, for-profits, non-profits, or any other entities where people work and live — and neither am I. What we are saying is that our thinking and acting toward the future must challenge the systems that would seek to short-circuit the very

The teacher looked at her, looked away, and instead called on a White hand as soon as it was raised. As the Black girl’s arm came down, I could see her head going down. As I saw her head going down, I could see her spirits going down. I turned and looked up at the teacher, who, of course, was not looking at me. She was too busy engaging a favored

Hate defers blame. It makes someone else responsible.

While white Americans fetishize the idea of living in racial harmony, they don’t think about the millions of instances of antiblack sentiment—overt and subtle—we encounter on a daily basis from the white world that has opened its doors to us but has done little remodeling.

do not seek to explain or resolve the question of this exclusion in terms of assimilation, inclusion, or civil or human rights, but rather depict aesthetically the impossibility of such resolutions by representing the paradoxes of blackness within and after the legacies of slavery’s denial of Black humanity. I name this paradox the wake, and I use

Ideas of blackness and criminality were becoming inherently interlinked.