Racism

“Racial discrimination” is an immediate and visible manifestation of an underlying racial policy.

In other words, Coltrane practiced or enacted a concept of tradition, community, and identity (in sound) that sonically expressed and illustrated for black people a range of possibilities for crafting individual and collective selves into a more expansive and complex notion of blackness.

out of raw self-interest; the racist policies necessitate racist ideas to justify them—lingers over the life of racism.

Indeed, for all their traditional antagonisms and obvious differences, the so-called black and so-called white people of the United States resemble nobody else in the world so much as they resemble each other.”

Before the door shut behind him, he bellowed, “I don’t open doors for chinks!” My sister burst into tears. She couldn’t understand why he was so mean. “That’s never happened to me before,” she cried. I wanted to run back into the mall and kill him. I had failed to protect my younger sister and I was helpless in my murderous rage against a grown man

Epistemicide is at the heart of colonization, but we cannot decolonize our minds by unknowing modernity. Like it or not, your belonging is dependent on a reclamation of the dismissed ancient and a reconciliation with the dominant modern.

slur. It is descriptive, and the only way to undo racism is to consistently identify and describe it—and then dismantle it. The attempt to turn this usefully descriptive term into an almost unusable slur is, of course, designed to do the opposite: to freeze us into inaction.

“Their cause must be our cause, too,” Lyndon Johnson said. “Because it is not just Negroes, but really it is all of us, who must overcome the crippling legacy of bigotry and injustice.”

When someone says Black people can’t be racist because Black people don’t have “institutional power,” they are flouting reality. The powerless defense strips Black policymakers and managers of all their power. The powerless defense says the more than 154 African Americans who have served in Congress from 1870 to 2018 had no legislative power. It