Sublime

As legal scholar Michelle Alexander outlines in The New Jim Crow, her bestselling account of the War on Drugs and its impact on the criminal justice system, more black men are currently under correctional control in the United States than were enslaved in 1850.

I dropped that apple, and, lo, it was putrid and full of worms. Then he spoke the truth: we didn’t have death. We had dead people. We had casualties and we had victims. We had more or less innocent bystanders. We had body counts and sometimes even photos in the newspapers of body bags, though many felt it was wrong to show them. We had “unequal hea

The more beautiful the woman was when she was younger, the more she had been treated like a celebrity—what I call a genetic celebrity—and therefore the more she felt like a has-been. It’s harder to lose something you’ve had than never to have it to begin with. As she became increasingly invisible, she felt increasingly disposable and increasingly a

Poverty measures exclude everyone in prison and jail—not to mention those housed in psych wards, halfway houses, and homeless shelters—which means there are millions more poor Americans than official statistics let on.[14] Poverty is the feeling that your government

She was lucky. Not just about the crocodiles and being in one piece, but because most of the girls they used for local color died before they were thirty.

She never tells her age, whereas Lynne flourishes hers. Clock up enough years, she’s in the habit of saying, and you can dance on a table provided you can still clamber up there. You can have sex with the mailman and nobody will care. You can flush away your push-up bras—not literally, you wouldn’t want plumbers involved, asking how the bra got int