Leonard Pitts Jr. stories

Well, as Carol Burnett used to say, I’m so glad we had this time together. I’ve written about 1.6 million words as a columnist. This 600 or so will be the last. I’m retiring for a few reasons. One is that, while I’ve managed to squeeze out four novels between...

Today’s topic: “How to be a Black man.” It’s a subject on which white conservatives are often quick to offer instruction to actual Black men, their utter lack of relevant experience notwithstanding. In split screens on Fox “News,” online and in emails to Black male columnists, they give unsought counsel....

Last week, Donald Trump finally crossed the Rubicon. That is, he took to his social media platform and, for the first time, issued an explicit call to abolish the U.S. Constitution — the document he once swore to “preserve, protect and defend.” Still fuming over widespread election cheating that exists...

But why? It is the question that haunts every mass shooting. It seems to be asked in the tacit belief that if we could just find a reasonable motive, just suss out a cause, it might provide a way to comprehend the incomprehensible — even suggest a road map to...

Joe Engel died last week. It’s unlikely you will know the name, especially if you don’t live in Charleston, S.C., his hometown since 1949. Joe never wrote a great novel or made a scientific breakthrough. His accomplishment was less gaudy, yet no less significant. Joe lived to tell. I met...

It might not have been what it looked like. That, at least, was the message you’d have heard had you turned to Tucker Carlson of Fox “News” for perspective the Monday after the recent massacre at Club Q in Colorado Springs. Club Q is a nightspot that had been known...

For Christmas, one year, my folks got my kid brother a tank. This thing could roll across the floor, the turret turned and it made battle sounds. That may not sound like much, but this was 1966 — color TV was like showing fire to a cave man — so...

“Here you come again, just when I’ve begun to get myself together …” — Dolly Parton He’s back. Granted, he never really left. Unlike other former presidents, Donald Trump didn’t disappear from the daily news cycle once he departed the White House. Thanks to his legal troubles, the hearings into...

A few words on the silence. As you doubtless recall, many of us regarded last week’s midterm election with existential dread. The path from there to the end of American democracy seemed all too easy to chart, what with election deniers campaigning for offices that would have put them in...

I have never seen America. Yes, like Bruce Springsteen, I was born in the U.S.A. But, as I’ve argued before, America is less a place than a set of democratic ideals: equality, self-governance, the rule of law, freedom of speech, freedom of protest, liberty and justice for all. America is...

Sometimes I wish white people could be Black. Not forever, mind you. Maybe for just a few weeks like John Howard Griffin, the author of “Black Like Me,” who darkened his skin and traveled the South in 1959. Sometimes, I wish white people could have that experience. Not so they...

An 82-year-old man sustains a skull fracture from a predawn home invasion, and you think it’s funny? Or that it’s fodder for another dumb conspiracy theory? What did you do with your humanity? Where did you mislay your souls? Have you no sense of decency at long last? One is...

Let us apologize in advance to Barack Obama, who once wrote a book called “The Audacity of Hope.” You see, our subject today is what might be called the Caucacity of Nope. The word is a new coinage, a portmanteau of “Caucasian” and “audacity” denoting a brand of white arrogance...

Honestly, Tony, my first instinct was to ignore you. That’s become my go-to when readers ask me, as you did in a recent email, to prove to their satisfaction that, “Republicans are keeping Black people from voting.” When I didn’t respond promptly enough, you said this strengthened your feeling “that...

Apparently, Craig Ridley somehow ceased to be a human being. That’s the only possible explanation for what he endured in a Florida prison. Five days in his cell, paralyzed, trapped in his own useless body, begging for help and being ignored. You don’t treat a human being that way. Heck,...

She shapes the question in a voice of rainy-day melancholy, frames it with piano meditation. “All we’ve been given by those who came before The dream of a nation where freedom would endure The work and prayers of centuries have brought us to this day What shall be our legacy?...

You know what’s really conservative? We’re talking more conservative than Southern Baptists, Fox “News” and the GOP combined. You know what’s that conservative? Money. Meaning big money — corporate money. It doesn’t do quixotic or go out on limbs. Money likes safe harbors and sure things. Its risks are calculated...

Tell us something we don’t know. Maybe that’s an ungenerous way to respond to a study on an important social issue by a respected, nonpartisan think tank. But, if you’ve been paying any attention at all, that may be your instinctive reaction to last week’s report from the Washington-based Public...

We are different from them. Instinctively, that’s what you’re thinking, right? Not that you don’t have reason. The news out of Iran that a 22-year-old woman named Mahsa Amini mysteriously died in custody after the nation’s “morality police” hauled her in for some violation of their oppressive dress code for...

When people show you who they are, believe them the first time.” — Maya Angelou Maya Angelou, meet Herschel Walker, Republican candidate for the U.S. Senate. Here he is on the Inflation Reduction Act: “A lot of money, it’s going to trees … . We’ve got enough trees. Don’t we...

Immigration is the last thing this is about. If conservatives really wanted to fix immigration, they could have done so years ago. Certainly, the broad outlines of a workable overhaul have long been obvious: a combination of hardened border security, a guest-worker program, streamlining the process for immigration and creating...

There are a few things you should be asking yourself right about now. Meaning you students who find yourselves living in places where self-appointed guardians of public morality have been busily banning books. This includes Texas, where Gov. Greg Abbott wants to jail librarians who allow students access to novels...

I’ve been meaning to write this one for years. It was the potato chips that finally made me do it. Not just any old Lay’s or Ruffles, mind you. No, I’m talking about a new-to-me brand of chips (on its website, the Miami-based company says it has actually been around...

There is no water in Jackson, Miss. Not at this writing, at least. At this writing, the nearly 150,000 residents of the state capital have been advised that even if they are able to coax some of the precious liquid from their taps — water pressure is feeble — it...

“Dare we hope?” That was the rather plaintive response of a man on Twitter when news broke that Kansas voters had rejected an attempt to remove the right to abortion from their state constitution. We are talking about a fire-engine-red state. It went for Donald Trump in 2016 and repeated...