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In elevating a race-centric interpretation of American life and history, Black Lives Matter has actually had the effect of making it more difficult to think critically and honestly about black life as it exists, in all of its complexity and contradictions.

By pointing up the central place of blacks in American society, Murray’s writing has served as something of an invitation to a black American homecoming, illustrating for blacks the reasons for embracing America; reasons that go beyond the simple lack of an alternative. Simply put, blacks can call...

Racial exceptionalism, political immutability, “antiblackness” as structural antagonism, and abjection in the form of “social death”: each of these concepts predates Afropessimism, and as I see it, together they form its foundation. Indeed, it is the synthesis of all of these ideas into one...

[W]e are no longer associated or connected to the BLM Global Network. [W]e have decided to rename part of our organization The Black Power Collective. [...] The Global Network is a top-down dogmatic organization that promotes certain chapters that choose to align with their direction and sequester...

It is important, as we look toward the daunting prospect of building a movement capable of changing the terms of debate in American politics to center the interests and concerns of working people—of all races, genders, sexual orientations, and whatever immigration status—who are the vast majority...

I would say to fellow African-Americans: No one is coming to save us! The situation in which we find ourselves is unfair, but this is not a question of justice. Nobody is coming, and, more fundamentally, no one can come into the most intimate relations between our women and men, into the families...

The lies are coming out one by one, and by the looks of it, it’s only a matter of time before someone goes to federal prison for misappropriation of funds.

It's not that people care more about statues than they do lives, it's that the vandalism is creating a counterproductive distraction from real efforts at political action.

Civil liberties are regarded by many as a chief obstacle to civil rights. To be sure, blacks are still on the front lines of First Amendment jurisprudence—but this time we soldier on the other side. The byword among many black activists and black intellectuals is no longer the political imperative...

Once it was effectively decoupled from political-economic dynamics, “racism” became increasingly amorphous as a charge or diagnosis—a blur of attitudes, utterances, individual actions, and patterned disparities, an autonomous force that acts outside of historically specific social relations. Today...

There’s “a contradiction at ‘left’ antiracism’s conceptual core: it hinges on the fantasy of a non-essentialist racial essentialism. No matter how elaborate, clever, absurd or heroic the efforts or how genuine and powerful the will to do so may be, it is simply not possible to square that fucking...