Race

What’s in a Name?

Yale’s president can’t make something less racist by fiat.

Fifty Years Ago, the Government Said Black Lives Matter

The radical conclusions of the 1968 Kerner Report.

I, Your Perfect Muse

Karen Lepri interviews Dawn Lundy Martin

On Stone Mountain

Bill Clinton, white supremacy, and the birth of the modern Democratic Party.

“We Called That Touch”

Race and the Intimate Tangle of American Experience

The Roots of Black Incarceration

A nineteenth-century memoir sheds light on the origins of the modern prison.

I Can’t Breathe

Black people get sicker because of stereotypes taught in medical schools.

Identity and the Avant-Garde

In art, formal innovation versus identity politics.

Pauli Murray, Beloved Radical

Crusading for black rights, women’s equality, and gender non-conformity.

Trump Voters Are Awakening America from Its Post-Racial Dream

Donald Trump’s backers force the United States to confront its long-submerged id.

Cuba After the Thaw

Worsening Inequality for Afro-Cubans and Women

A Street Divided

The Long Life of Segregation

Race and Dignity

Freedom Can’t Be Left to Chance

Righteous Indignation in Ferguson

In Ferguson, white violence, exclusively, is justified.

Our Own Private Disaster

Terrible Schools Are Great for Business

I’m Fine How I Am

A response to Randall Kennedy’s defense of respectability politics.

Desegregation Is Not Intolerable Social Engineering

The new HUD desegregation rule is a democratic reform, not a utopian one.

The Moynihan Report at Fifty

On the long reach of intellectual racism.

Racism: Dumb and Personal / Smart and Structural

Opponents often associate racism with ignorance. But intelligent people promote oppression through colorblindness.

American Cynicism

And its cure.

Corporate Welfare Is Draining Baltimore

We need to turn to the economic violence that attends police violence.

Family Farms vs. Americanism

Below the surface–and sometimes above it–a lot of today’s debates around immigration reform are about cultural assimilation.

Police Manipulate Freddie Gray Story Through Leak

One of the many disturbing dimensions of Freddie Gray’s death after riding in a Baltimore Police van is how little the public knows about the circumstances.

“Purity” and the “Avant-Garde”

I am sick of the term “avant-garde.”

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