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Race

Arts in Society

The Origins of Sexual Healing

Grammy winner David Ritz, who cowrote Marvin Gaye’s legendary “Sexual Healing,” recalls how the song emerged from Gaye’s struggles with faith, drug addiction, and childhood abuse.

David Ritz

Forum

How Race Made the Opioid Crisis

The success of OxyContin hinged on racially bifurcated understandings of addiction. The fundamental division between “dope” and medicine, after all, has always been the race and class of users.

Donna Murch

Politics, Race

The Fragile Patriotism of the American Conservative

The New York Times’s new 1619 Project argues fiercely for a new understanding of what it means to believe in America—and it is cracking the very foundations of conservatism.

David Walsh

Reading Lists

Essential Reads on White Supremacy

It's what our country was founded on—and it will take more than voting out Trump to dismantle it. 

Rosie Gillies, Boston Review

Arts in Society

The Precarity of Black Motherhood

Jordan Peele's ‘Us’ depicts the terrors faced by black mothers in a way that owes as much to Toni Morrison’s ‘Beloved’ as it does to classic Hollywood horror. 

Tao Leigh Goffe

Politics, Race

The Armed and Anxious White Psyche

Contemporary gun violence is not so much terrorism as tradition. It is deeply intertwined with the white supremacist foundations of the United States.

Mark Tseng-Putterman

Arts in Society

The Other Toni Morrison

A timely new documentary celebrates Morrison’s novels, but downplays the enduring power of her work as an editor and essayist.

Joy James

Science & Nature

Is There a Human Blueprint?

Two new books from intellectual giants Robert Plomin and Nicholas Christakis revive the “nature vs. nurture” debate about what makes people different from one another.

C. Brandon Ogbunu, C. Malik Boykin

Politics, Race

Solid Trumpism

Donald Trump has the most stable approval rating of any president since Harry Truman. As we gear up for the 2020 election, the challenge we now face is the remarkable stability of his support.

Ronald Aronson

Reading Lists

The World’s Top 50 Thinkers

Twenty percent of them are Boston Review contributors! 

Rosie Gillies, Boston Review

Race

Black Masculinity Under Racial Capitalism

A truly radical counterhegemony can only be realized by disassociating both blackness and manhood from capitalist registers of worth. 

Jordanna Matlon

Race

Dying of Whiteness

State policies shaped by white supremacy increase mortality rates in much the same way as other manmade health risks, such as pollution.

Jonathan M. Metzl

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