Invisible Man, Got the Whole World Watching: A Young Black Man's Education

by Mychal Denzel Smith

And the more the image of black men is connected to everything wrong with the world, the easier it is to justify killing us. Racism comes to be seen as a natural reaction to the existence of black monsters.

We have done so because we have come to believe in patriarchy and male dominance as the realization of freedom.

One of the privileges of not being a part of a marginalized group is believing you can set your own benchmarks for bigotry.

We make a grave mistake every time we invoke the history of oppression to diminish the reality of racism’s present. Progress is real, but the narrative of progress seduces us into inaction. If we believe, simply, that it gets better, there is no incentive to do the work to ensure that it does.