African-Americans
Daily Comment
Can Chicago Manage Its Migrant Crisis?
Hosting tens of thousands of new arrivals has stoked Black residents’ sense of neglect.
Under Review
Deion Sanders and the Past and Future of College Football
To some, his work is a spectacle. He sees it as a calling. But it’s clear Coach Prime is changing the game.
Our Columnists
Ibram X. Kendi’s Anti-Racism
The historian espoused grand ambitions to dismantle American racism, but the crisis at his research center suggests that he always had a more limited view of change.
Annals of Inquiry
Searching for a Fortress Built by People Who Escaped Slavery
Its ruins are somewhere in the swamps of Georgia. What will it take to find them?
The New Yorker Interview
Wes Moore Would Like to Make History
Maryland’s first Black governor talks about his surprise win, what working in banking taught him about power, his grandmother’s advice, and the importance of service.
Listening Booth
How Dorothy Ashby Made the Harp Swing
Her virtuosity won the instrument a place in jazz, but her achievements have long been overlooked.
Dispatch
The Black Families Seeking Reparations in California’s Gold Country
Descendants of enslaved people want land seized by the state returned and recognition of the gold rush’s rich, and largely ignored, Black history.
Essay
The Unexpected Grief of a Hysterectomy
My uterus is causing me nothing but discomfort. So why am I so sad to lose it?
Listening Booth
The Expansive Sounds of an Unsung Album Called “Black Music”
Marc Anthony Thompson, with the musical collective Chocolate Genius, produced some of the great confessional songs of the nineties. But critics seemed eager to define the project by what it wasn’t.
Our Columnists
The Racial Politics of the N.B.A. Have Always Been Ugly
A new book argues that the real history of the league is one of strife between Black labor and white ownership.
Daily Comment
Hip-Hop at Fifty: An Elegy
A generation is still dying younger than it should—this time, of “natural causes.”
Screening Room
A Black Woman’s Spiritual Journey Up a Mountain, in “You Go Girl!”
In Shariffa Ali’s short film, a comedian grapples with her fears and finds healing and solidarity in the outdoors.
Q. & A.
The Meaning of African American Studies
The discipline emerged from Black struggle. Now the College Board wants it to be taught with barely any mention of Black Lives Matter.
Cultural Comment
The Memphis Police Are Not Bystanders to the Death of Tyre Nichols
By appropriating citizen-made mechanisms for monitoring violence, the police have spun failed reform into a myth of incremental accountability.
Daily Comment
The Police Folklore That Helped Kill Tyre Nichols
A 1992 study claims that officers who show weakness are more likely to be killed. Law-enforcement culture has never recovered.
Photo Booth
Baldwin Lee’s Extraordinary Pictures from the American South
A new book—the first-ever collection of Lee’s work—and a solo exhibition in New York make the case that he is one of the great overlooked luminaries of American picture-making.
The New Yorker Interview
Lorraine O’Grady Has Always Been a Rebel
The eighty-eight-year-old artist and critic, whose profile has risen in the past decade, examines her role in the art world then and now.
Under Review
The Defeat of Identity Politics
In a new book, the philosopher Olúfẹ́mi O. Táíwò condemns the “elite capture” of radical movements.
The Sporting Scene
Frances Tiafoe Is More Than a Good Story
The son of immigrants from Sierra Leone, Tiafoe is the first Black American to make the men’s semifinals at the U.S. Open since Arthur Ashe did it fifty years ago.