Sublime

I’d only been alive seventeen years and I was already tired of paying for white folks’ feelings with a generic smile and manufactured excellence they could not give one fuck about. I’d never heard of white folk getting caught and paying for anything they did to us, or stole from us. Didn’t matter if it was white police, white teachers, white studen

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

I listened to the Coup and read everything James Baldwin had written that summer. I learned you haven’t read anything if you’ve only read something once or twice. Reading things more than twice was the reader version of revision. I read The Fire Next Time over and over again. I wondered how it would read differently had the entire book, and not jus

When I was told, it takes time, when I was young, I was being told it will take time before a Black person can be treated as a human being here, but it will happen. We will help to make it happen. We promise you. Sixty years of one man’s life is a long time to deliver on a promise, especially considering all the lives preceding and surrounding my o

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 W