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.

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

“I was the wealthiest, most powerful person Brown knew, and I had sixty-seven dollars in my banking account.”

Kids say it’s fun to take cars. They brag to each other about how many they’ve stolen and the sleekest models they’ve sped away in. They say they are bored and that it’s easy, sharing videos of themselves driving at 120 miles per hour. They smile with key fobs, offering rides on Facebook. But all of the biggest car thieves had something to run from.

“I underwent, during the summer that I became fourteen, a prolonged religious crisis. I use “religious” in the common, and arbitrary, sense, meaning that I then discovered God, His saints and angels, and His blazing Hell. And since I had been born in a Christian nation, I accepted this Deity as the only one. I supposed Him to exist only within the walls of a church—in fact, of our church—and I also supposed that God and safety were synonymous.”

A professor conducts a lifelong racial experiment.

On affirmative action at the University of Texas, the essence of privilege, and getting what you deserve.

This job—writing college essays for Abigail Fishers—was the only job I have ever been truly ashamed of, and I am so ashamed of it now that it hurts.

William Regnery II spent almost 20 years funding the racist right. It finally paid off.

Life for a Muslim doctor in rural Minnesota before and after the election of Donald Trump.