The Mask of Doom
A profile of MF Doom.
Ta-Nehisi Coates
The Life Breonna Taylor Lived, in the Words of Her Mother
I say, Where’s Breonna, why won’t anybody say where Breonna is? He says, Well, ma’am, she’s still in the apartment. And I know what that means.
The Black Family in the Age of Mass Incarceration
“Peril is generational for black people in America—and incarceration is our current mechanism for ensuring that the peril continues.”
The Case for Reparations
“Until we reckon with our compounding moral debts, America will never be whole.”
The Champion Barack Obama
How Black America talks to the White House.
I’m Not Black, I’m Kanye
What Kanye West really wants.
The First White President
“The foundation of Donald Trump’s presidency is the negation of Barack Obama’s legacy.”
My President Was Black
A history of the first African American White House—and of what came next.
Playboy Interview: Ta-Nehisi Coates
“Things don’t just flow out of your brain. It’s not like, Hey, I’m brilliant. Show up, paper right here, bam, another banger. No—you sit and you struggle with yourself and you stop cutting your hair. I’m not cutting my hair right now. You stop shaving, like I’m not shaving right now. You remember that you can fail. I’ve failed several times. The fact that everybody else don’t see that don’t give me the right to not see it.”
Letter to My Son
“Here is what I would like for you to know: In America, it is traditional to destroy the black body—it is heritage.”
Acting French
On learning a new language, a new culture, and why “it must never be concluded that an urge toward the cosmopolitan, toward true education, will make people stop hitting you.”
Why Do So Few Blacks Study the Civil War?
“We are invited to listen, but never to truly join the narrative, for to speak as the slave would, to say that we are as happy for the Civil War as most Americans are for the Revolutionary War, is to rupture the narrative.”
Confessions of a Black Mr. Mom
An essay on African-American fatherhood.
Fear of a Black President
The false promise and double standard of integration in the Obama era.
The Legacy of Malcolm X
As surely as 2008 was made possible by black people’s long fight to be publicly American, it was also made possible by those same Americans’ long fight to be publicly black. That latter fight belongs especially to one man, as does the sight of a first family bearing an African name. Barack Obama is the president. But it’s Malcolm X’s America.
“This Is How We Lost to the White Man”
The audacity of Bill Cosby’s black conservatism.
