A Political and Literary Forum
Fifty years ago, when Martin Luther King, Jr., was assassinated, a devastated James Baldwin made a final attempt to reconcile the generational divide between the civil rights movement and Black Power.
Ed Pavlić
The persistence of black poverty has become a permanent feature of U.S. democracy. We need an expanded political imagination to dismantle it.
Thad Williamson
Black Panther, a movie unique for its black star power, depends on a shocking devaluation of black American men.
Christopher Lebron
Support for the U.S. military has long been seen as a crucial way for black Americans and immigrants to show that they “belong.”
Aziz Rana
A video interview with Brandon Terry.
Brandon M. Terry
Self-defense is not merely an individual right, it is collective political resistance.
Chad Kautzer
Fifty years after the death of Martin Luther King, Jr., canonization has prevented a reckoning with the substance of King’s intellectual, ethical, and political commitments.
America loves pitting black intellectuals against each other, but today's activists need both Coates and West.
Robin D. G. Kelley
In 2017, racism and xenophobia have played major roles in U.S. politics. As the year draws to a close, we present our top stories about race, immigration, and the dangerous ideology of white nationalism, from myths about Appalachia to racial capitalism to regimes of deportation.
Boston Review
Nixon’s embrace of “black capitalism” was a canny move that ultimately decimated the black community and turned the wealth gap into a wealth chasm.
Mehrsa Baradaran
We have to do much more than fight back, we have to fight for the world that could liberate and sustain us all when Trump is gone.
J. D. Vance's Hillbilly Elegy has been held up as a guidebook for understanding the 2016 election, but his logic is rooted in an enduring and dangerous myth about race in Appalachia.
Elizabeth Catte
Ta-Nehisi Coates’s latest book is his clearest expression yet of political fatalism. But black activism has always believed in the possibility of change.
Melvin Rogers
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Sarah Hill
Merve Emre, Deborah Chasman
Helena Rosenblatt
Robert Homan
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