Many black scholars—especially those who study black life, history, and culture—would recognize an uncomfortable and familiar situation that epitomizes ...
Tag: Racism
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 ...
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 ...
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 ...
Public Thinker: Keisha N. Blain on Black Women’s Intellectual History
Keisha N. Blain has quickly become one of the most innovative and influential ...
“Rivers of Blood” @50
Imperial historians, and inhabitants of places colonized by Britain, know that much of England’s history happened beyond its borders. As decolonization whittled away imperial possessions ...
Martin Luther King Jr. and Milwaukee: 200 Nights and a Tragedy
The tragic murder of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. in April 1968 sent shock waves ...
Memorializing Martin Luther King Jr. in Washington, DC
My introduction to Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was in the home of my ...
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 ...
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 ...
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 ...
A Tapestry of Black Lives
James Baldwin’s legacy looms powerfully in this current moment. This may be all the more true for black writers. Rachel Kaadzi Ghansah, one of the contributors to Jesmyn Ward’s timely new anthology ...
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 ...
The Big Picture: The Promise of Sanctuary
In June 2015, during the early days of his candidacy during the Republican primaries, Donald Trump declared: “I will build a great, great wall on our southern border, and I will make Mexico pay for ...
The Big Picture: Confederate Revisionist History
Donald Trump was elected on a wave of unrestrained white nationalism that promised to “take back our country,” and in so doing “make America great again.” His pandering to white racial resentment ...
The Big Picture: Criminalizing Immigrants
Peering out the windows of John F. Kennedy Airport in the early morning hours of January 29, 2017, I had hope for this country’s future on immigration policy. Hundreds of ordinary New Yorkers were ...