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Politics, Race

The Hidden Stakes of the 1619 Controversy

Seeking to discredit those who wish to explain the persistence of racism, critics of the New York Times’s 1619 Project insist the facts don’t support its proslavery reading of the American Revolution. But they obscure a longstanding debate within the field of U.S. history over that very issue—distorting the full case that can be made for it.

David Waldstreicher

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Race

Race

American Racism in the Time of Plagues

The United States has a long history of blaming Asian immigrants for outbreaks of disease. Every time, democracy and public health suffer.

Andrew Lanham

Politics, Race

Missing Zinn

On the tenth anniversary of radical historian Howard Zinn’s death, Cornel West opens up about their friendship and what Zinn would have made of the decade—including whether he would have voted for Bernie.

Cornel West, Mordecai Lyon

Class & Inequality, Race

American Bottom

Designed as a bucolic working-class suburb of St. Louis, the nearly all-black town of Centreville now floods with raw sewage every time it rains. “Bring us back some help,” residents say, living through an environmental horror that evokes centuries of official disinterest in black suffering, as well as a future in which the poor are left to suffer in areas made uninhabitable by climate change.

Walter Johnson

Race

The Radical Lives of Abolitionists

History has tended to sanitize the lives of abolitionists, many of whom were involved in other radical movements as well, including Free Love, which promoted women’s independence and an end to traditional marriage.

Britt Rusert

Race

Black Abolitionists Believed in Taking Up Arms

Long before the Civil War, black abolitionists shared the consensus that violence would be necessary to end slavery. Unlike their white peers, their arguments were about when and how to use political violence, not if.

Randal Maurice Jelks

Arts in Society, Race

Ally: From Noun to Verb

Robin D. G. Kelley talks with musician Vijay Iyer about systems of oppression, the responsibility of artists, and how jazz sells proximity to blackness to white people.

Robin D. G. Kelley, Vijay Iyer

Race, War & Security

The Pervasive Power of the Settler Mindset

More than simple racism or discrimination, the destructive premise at the core of the American settler narrative is that freedom is built upon violent elimination.

Nikhil Pal Singh

Race

Against Black Homeownership

The real estate market is so structured by race that black families will never come out ahead.

Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor

Race

The Greensboro Massacre at 40

On November 3, 1979, members of the KKK and American Nazi Party murdered five labor organizers in broad daylight. Forty years later, massacre survivor Rosalyn Pelles talks about that day, and why organized workers are such a threat to the powerful.

Rosalyn Pelles, Jordan T. Camp

Race

The Revolutionary and the Historian

Harvard professor Walter Johnson and rapper Tef Poe reflect on their shared activism, and the place they see for allies—accomplices, even—in the long struggle for racial justice.

Walter Johnson, Tef Poe, Mordecai Lyon

Race

The Conservative Black Nationalism of Clarence Thomas

Joshua Cohen and Corey Robin discuss the black nationalism at the heart of Thomas’s conservative jurisprudence—and what it means for those on the left who often dismiss the justice’s use of race. 

Joshua Cohen, Corey Robin

Race

Before America Burned

A new book explores how William F. Buckley, Jr., and James Baldwin came to share a stage in 1965 and what their debate over black inequality reveals about the modern conservative movement. 

Robert L. Tsai

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