Race

A People’s Anthology: Episode Two

“The July Rebellions and the ‘Military State’” by Jack O’Dell. 

A People’s Anthology: Episode One

Carole Boyce Davies on Claudia Jones’s “An End of the Neglect of the Problems of the Negro Woman!”

A People’s Anthology

A podcast reading series of radical essays and speeches from U.S. history.

Immigration Enforcement and the Afterlife of the Slave Ship

Coast Guard techniques for blocking Haitian asylum seekers have their roots in the slave trade. Understanding these connections can help us disentangle immigration policy from white nationalism.

“White Fragility” Gets Jackie Robinson’s Story Wrong

Robin DiAngelo’s best-selling book sells a misguided view of baseball integration to her readers and corporate clients.

Black History in Three Acts

The story of how Black people confront systems of racial capitalism and plot world liberation. A reading list from Robin D. G. Kelley.

Ancestral Wealth

The Sacred Black Masculine in My Life

DNA and Our Twenty-First-Century Ancestors

Home DNA ancestry kits include no ancestors, instead comparing customers to other present-day people based on assumptions about race and ethnicity. So what are they actually selling?

Poisoning Tallevast

First, segregation blocked this Florida community from equal education and other public goods. Then the military–industrial complex sickened residents and destroyed their property.

The Logic of Eugenics Still Haunts Virginia

Elizabeth Catte’s new book examines how Virginia progressives believed the forced sterilization of poor whites would pave the way to a bright future—and how their legacy endures in national parks and prisons.

How Nations Heal

We cannot simply put the past behind us. The framework of transitional justice offers a promising path forward.

Whiteness Is the Greatest Racial Fraud

The Krugs and Dolezals dominate the headlines, but they are distractions from the fraud that imperils us all: believing oneself to be white.

The Fight Ahead

The Republican Party has become a white nationalist party. If old-fashioned politics can’t change that, we must consider alternatives.

Witnessing Grace

In Be Holding, celebrated poet Ross Gay interweaves the legacy of one of basketball’s greatest moments with a meditation on Black resilience.

Racism and Respiration

COVID-19’s disproportionate impact on Black communities is just one of many respiratory inequities shaped by systemic racism.

Is There a War on Thanksgiving?

Some on the right insist that efforts to curtail Thanksgiving are in reality sinister attempts to rewrite the country’s history.

J. D. Vance’s Political Mythology

Why Hillbilly Elegy strikes such a national nerve.

I Don’t Have to Forgive Joe Biden

We should condemn the president-elect’s record on race, but that does not foreclose hope for his administration.

The Long Shadow of Racial Fascism

A debate is roiling about the aptness of comparing Trump to European fascists. But radical Black thinkers have long argued that racial slavery created its own unique form of American fascism.

The Politics of White Anxiety

Trump is only the latest to exploit it. A new path forward must address the structures that sustain it.

Toward a Global History of White Supremacy

The simultaneous success of Trump and Brexit was no coincidence.

Is Freedom White?

Talk of American freedom has long been connected to the presumed right of whites to dominate everyone else.

The Racist Foundation of Nuclear Architecture

On the 75th anniversary of the bombing of Hiroshima, it is clear that white supremacy sustains the U.S. nuclear arsenal.

How the Law Killed Ahmaud Arbery

In many states, legal regimes sanction the predictable murder of innocent black men. Justice will not be served until the law changes.

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