Sublime

Chicago, where the black population had doubled in a decade, a black youth who fell asleep on a raft on Lake Michigan and drifted onto a white beach was stoned to death by a white crowd, provoking two weeks of bitter rioting in which thirty-eight people were killed and whole neighborhoods razed.

During the civil rights era, white elites supported the desegregation of public parks and pools because they didn’t use those spaces anyway. They had private clubs. This enraged working-class whites, who called it “integration for everyone but the rich.” In the 1970s, wealthy white liberals resisted rezoning their communities to be more inclusive

She had been stricken from her marriage, rendered near penniless by the events, and was now an older and disregarded woman. It’s a harrowingly common feeling, even if the details of her experience and solution are particular. We women age, eyes sweep over us in obvious disregard, our moments of confusion are mocked, our knowledge makes us

a profoundly unequal place, Whiteness is supposed to mean something. Whenever that is threatened, a hot resentment bubbles.

Is there any tribe more

In 1989, on Martin Luther King Jr.’s birthday in Overtown, the Colombian-born police officer William Lozano crashed his car into a biker, Clement Lloyd, who was fleeing him. Another young Black man riding with Lloyd, Allan Blanchard, also died from the ensuing crash. Blanchard had just arrived in Miami from the Virgin Islands. Three days of

People who shut their eyes to reality simply invite their own destruction, and anyone who insists on remaining in a state of innocence long after that innocence is dead turns himself into a monster. The time has come to realize that the interracial drama acted out on the American continent has not only created a new black man, it has created a new

The murder of Emmett Till is just one example of the history that informs an oft-repeated warning from my African American colleagues: “When a white woman cries, a black man gets hurt.” Not knowing or being sensitive to this history is another example of white centrality, individualism, and lack of racial humility.