How the bestselling sci-fi author builds her stories.

"Until we reckon with our compounding moral debts, America will never be whole."

The answer to the disparity in death rates has everything to do with the lived experience of being a black woman in America.

From Driving Miss Daisy to Green Book.

Not knowing what these movies were “about” didn’t mean it wasn’t clear what they were about. They symbolize a style of American storytelling in which the wheels of interracial friendship are greased by employment, in which prolonged exposure to the black half of the duo enhances the humanity of his white, frequently racist counterpart. All the optimism of racial progress — from desegregation to integration to equality to something like true companionship — is stipulated by terms of service.

An interview with James Baldwin on race in America.

How Black America talks to the White House.

A generation of African American heroin users is dying in the opioid epidemic nobody talks about. The nation’s capital is ground zero.

The actual story behind those viral college acceptance videos out of T.M. Landry.

Should art be a battleground for social justice?

A profile.

“The echoing horror of slavery cuts both ways. We are often afraid to say what we know is true. The South is disaster and it is also miracle.”

In Baltimore and other segregated cities, the life-expectancy gap between African-Americans and whites is as much as 20 years. One young woman’s struggle shows why.

What Kanye West really wants.

On history, race, and guns in America.

How a journalist who wrote a seminal account of police brutality during the 1967 race riots in Newark wound up on the wrong side of the law.

It’s a made-up label.

A major black novelist made a remarkable début. How did he disappear?

Life after Get Out.

How the GOP took control of state politics in Alabama, leaving black lawmakers—and their constituents—powerless.

Not education. Not income. Not even being an expert on racial disparities in health care.

“The specific dissonance of Trumpism—advocacy for discriminatory, even cruel, policies combined with vehement denials that such policies are racially motivated—provides the emotional core of its appeal. It is the most recent manifestation of a contradiction as old as the United States, a society founded by slaveholders on the principle that all men are created equal.”

A weekend with the United Order of Tents, a semi-covert organization of black women.

Black people struggling with debts are far less likely than their white peers to gain lasting relief from bankruptcy. A style of bankruptcy practiced by lawyers in the South is primarily to blame.

“Colin Kaepernick is inconvenient. To persist is to show strength, but also to be unpredictable, hard to define, impossible to control. And to grow stronger with every lash is to become dangerous—a threat not only to power, but to inspire others to follow suit.”

They were the first black boys to integrate the South’s elite prep schools. They drove themselves to excel in an unfamiliar environment. But at what cost?