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Race

Baldwin’s Lonely Country

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

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Race

Race

MLK Now

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.

Brandon M. Terry

Race

Coates and West in Jackson

America loves pitting black intellectuals against each other, but today's activists need both Coates and West.

Robin D. G. Kelley

Race, Reading Lists

Our Top Stories on Race in 2017

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

Class & Inequality, Race

A Bad Check for Black America

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

Politics, Race

One Year Later

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.

Robin D. G. Kelley

Politics, Race

The Mythical Whiteness of Trump Country

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

Race

Keeping the Faith

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

Law & Justice, Race

The Untold Story of Mass Incarceration

Two new books, including National Book Award nominee ‘Locking Up Our Own,’ address major blind spots about the causes of America’s carceral failure.

Vesla M. Weaver

Race

The Descent of Democracy

While the United States has expanded its borders of inclusion over time, the borders of whiteness have never fallen. Only a robust black public sphere can change that.

Khalil Gibran Muhammad

Race

Statue Mania

Focusing only on Confederate monuments misses that racism is memorialized everywhere.

Jonathan Beecher Field

Gender & Sexuality, Race

Beyond Racism and Misogyny

Black feminism and the 2 Live Crew.

Kimberlé W. Crenshaw

Class & Inequality, Race

Why Coretta Scott King Fought for a Job Guarantee

Coretta Scott King saw economic precarity as not just a side effect of racial subjugation, but as central to its functioning.

David Stein

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