Sublime
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Before I was a real academic, I was a black woman and before I was a black woman I was a black girl. I was a certain kind of black girl. I am the only child of an only child who was the child of a woman whose grandparents had been touched by slavery. We are southern, almost pedestrianly so. We are the people who went north to Harlem but not west to
... See moreTressie McMillan Cottom • Thick: And Other Essays
before they both unload, twenty shots in all, four connecting with a body that is no longer his own, perhaps never was, after all, it’s not a sudden loss of rights that enables a pair of men to destroy another’s body on suspicion, no, it’s not sudden; the perception of a young Black male existed long before this moment, before he fit a description,
... See moreCaleb Azumah Nelson • Open Water: Winner of the Costa First Novel Award 2021
James Agee’s “A Death in the Family,” Ann Petry’s “Country Place,” Thornton Wilder’s “The Ides of March,” Cynthia Ozick’s “Trust,” Richard Stern’s “Other Men’s Daughters,” J. F. Powers’s “Morte d’Urban,” Jean Stafford’s “The Mountain Lion,” William Maxwell’s “The Château,” Louis Auchincloss’s “The Rector of Justin,” Richard Yates’s “The Easter
... See moreI loved and hated my father for living on his own terms in a world that usually denies Black people their own terms. It was the sort of defiance that could have gotten him lynched by a mob in a different time and place—or lynched by men in badges today.
Ibram X. Kendi • How to Be an Antiracist
This was not a problem specific to my school or my childhood—it’s a problem
Ibram X. Kendi • How to Be an Antiracist
To be an American is to be infused with the plantation South, with its Black vernacular, its insurgency, and also its brutal masculinity, its worship of Whiteness, its expulsion and its massacres, its self-defeating stinginess and unapologetic pride.