Was Sharmila Sen “happy” on the first morning she woke up in the United States to the strange smell of bacon frying? That’s what her young son wants to ...
Tag: Race
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 ...
Who Segregated America?
Recently long-listed for the National Book Award for nonfiction, Richard Rothstein’s The Color of Law is an accessible and powerful account of how metropolitan America became racially segregated ...
Harper Lee, Segregationist?
“Biography,” according to Janet Malcolm in The Silent Woman, “is the medium through which the remaining secrets of the famous dead are taken from them and ...
Citizens to Come: Building Beyond the 14th Amendment
On the 150th anniversary of the 14th Amendment we are called upon ...
Toward the Black Girl Future
To read Eve L. Ewing is to read Chicago. Born and raised in the city’s Logan Square neighborhood in the 1980s and 1990s, Ewing’s love for the city is palpable in ...
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 ...
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 ...
Adoption Anxieties
Given the overall paucity of novels about interracial adoption, it is striking that no fewer than three were published in 2017. In general, reviewers warmly received Shanthi Sekaran’s Lucky Boy, Lisa ...
Frederick Douglass Is No Libertarian
It’s the 200th anniversary of Frederick Douglass’s birth, and some on the right have been crashing the party. To mark the start of last year’s African American ...
Public Thinker: Keisha N. Blain on Black Women’s Intellectual History
Keisha N. Blain has quickly become one of the most innovative and influential ...
Gun Studies Syllabus
In the aftermath of the Parkland school shooting of February 14, 2018, scholar Danielle McGuire invited historians on Twitter to propose readings that would provide resources for gun control ...
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 ...
Walking the Beat in Segregated Atlanta
After more than a year riding along with Philadelphia policemen, getting to know their beats and routes through the City of Brotherly Love, Jonathan Rubinstein ...
Watery Roots: The Alex Haley Swimming Pool, Ithaca, NY
The writer Alex Haley was born in the city of Ithaca (just south of Ulysses, NY) ...
The Triumph of Afrikaans Fiction
I’m reading one of the great novels of our time. I’m doing so slowly because it’s in Afrikaans, and although I learned the language for many years in South ...
When the Klan Returns
For nearly a century, the 1920s Ku Klux Klan has seemed an exception that proves a rule. Far-right movements typically eschew electoral politics, as earlier and later waves of the Klan also did. But ...