A year ago I was a recent college grad living in Toulouse, in southern France. My generous host family ...
Global Black History
Current Editor: Annette Joseph-Gabriel
Past Editor: Keisha N. Blain
B-Sides: Randall Jarrell’s “Pictures from an Institution”
While hard at work on his 1954 Pictures from an Institution, Randall Jarrell ...
And the Women Shall Lead Us
Our historical and contemporary images of black nationalism privilege the masculine. This is true whether in distant or recent memory. Images of black men dressed ...
Black Speculation, Black Freedom
Many black scholars—especially those who study black life, history, and culture—would recognize an uncomfortable and familiar situation that epitomizes ...
Rethinking Civil Rights, Reimagining Black Liberation
Occupy Wall Street and Black Lives Matter ushered in a new era of social ...
American Cuisine’s Debt to the Enslaved
Men and houses lie; plantation mistresses beat naked cooks. These and other facts have been shrouded in a mythology that rose with the smoke from kitchen fires ...
Free the Most Oppressed First
Do we still need to talk about identity politics? In the wake of the 2016 election and amid the ongoing parody that is the Trump administration, the subject has ...
Black Women Leaders, Then and Now
In August 1966, Ebony magazine published an entire issue devoted to “The Negro Woman.” In it was an article by television personality and journalist ...
Zora Neale Hurston Against the World
Throughout her life, Zora Neale Hurston held fast to a belief in the individual’s power against seemingly insurmountable forces, especially institutional racism ...
Zora Neale Hurston in the Making
Zora Neale Hurston’s second trip to Africatown was a chance for redemption. An earlier visit to the settlement outside Mobile, Alabama, had produced ...
Black Banks Can’t Fix Racial Capitalism
In this article I interview University of Georgia School of Law professor Mehrsa Baradaran, whose latest book, The Color of Money: Black Banks and the Racial ...
We See You, Race Women
When I was in graduate school, whenever a black woman scholar presented her work a peculiar phenomenon emerged: peers always and only remarked on the speaker’s person, rather than on her ideas. At ...
The Ambivalence of Appropriation
One day in the summer of 2001, English professor and cultural critic Eric Lott received a phone call from rock journalist Greil Marcus. Marcus had some news ...
“For the Black and White Youth of the South”
Speaking with Jerome Tarshis in 1974, Ernest J. Gaines talked about his desire to write a story with “the barber shop type of thing.” Looking at James Joyce’s “Ivy ...
Black Athletes, Black Activists
Today the 2018 Winter Olympics kick off in Pyeongchang, South Korea. With a US president who has gone out of his way to attack black athletes and Black Lives ...
Expanding the Black Geopolitical Imagination
In the wake of Michael Brown’s heinous murder, news of protests and social unrest in Ferguson, Missouri, captured the attention of viewers around the globe. In the Middle East, Palestinians took to ...
The Devil Wears Pravda
In the mid-1930s, amid the Second World War and the Great Depression, competing forms of internationalism—the Communist International, Black Internationalism, the League of Nations—defined the ...
Rewriting the History of Racist Ideas
While first reading Ibram X. Kendi’s kaleidoscopic and admirably lucid Stamped from the Beginning: The Definitive History of Racist Ideas, I had a flashback to my days as a graduate ...
W. E. B. Du Bois’s Revolutions
“Today I have reached my conclusion,” wrote W. E. B. Du Bois on October 1, 1961: “Capitalism cannot reform itself; it is doomed to self-destruction. No ...
If You’re Woke You Dig It: William Melvin Kelley
William Melvin Kelley, the experimental novelist and filmmaker—who mastered and reinvented a kind of midcentury literary style crafted from a colorful …
