Essays and Commentary on Race and Racism
Our Columnists
The Players’ Revolt Against Racism, Inequality, and Police Terror
A group of athletes across various American professional sports have communicated the fear, frustration, and anger of most of Black America.
Our Columnists
Until Black Women Are Free, None of Us Will Be Free
Barbara Smith and the Black feminist visionaries of the Combahee River Collective.
Comment
John Lewis’s Legacy and America’s Redemption
The civil-rights leader, who died Friday, acknowledged the darkest chapters of the country’s history, yet insisted that change was always possible.
Racial Injustice in America
Europe in 1989, America in 2020, and the Death of the Lost Cause
A whole vision of history seems to be leaving the stage.
Cultural Comment
The Messy Politics of Black Voices—and “Black Voice”—in American Animation
Cartoons have often been considered exempt from the country’s prejudices. In fact, they form a genre built on the marble and mud of racial signification.
Personal History
The Purpose of a House
For my daughters, the pandemic was a relief from race-related stress at school. Then George Floyd was killed.
Personal History
My Mother’s Dreams for Her Son, and All Black Children
She longed for black people in America not to be forever refugees—confined by borders that they did not create and by a penal system that killed them before they died.
News Desk
After George Floyd and Juneteenth
What’s ahead for the movement, the election, and the protesters?
Comment
Juneteenth and the Meaning of Freedom
Emancipation is a marker of progress for white Americans, not black ones.
Racial Injustice in America
A Memory of Solidarity Day, on Juneteenth, 1968
The public outpouring over racism that has been taking place in America since George Floyd’s murder feels like a long-postponed renewal of the reckoning that shook the nation more than half a century ago.
Cultural Comment
Seeing Police Brutality Then and Now
We still haven’t fully recognized the art made by twentieth-century black artists.
American Chronicles
The History of the “Riot” Report
How government commissions became alibis for inaction.
This Is America
So Brutal a Death
Nationwide outrage over George Floyd’s brutal killing by police officers resonates with immigrants, and with people around the world.
Comment
An American Spring of Reckoning
In death, George Floyd’s name has become a metaphor for the stacked inequities of the society that produced them.
Dept. of Design
The Mimetic Power of D.C.’s Black Lives Matter Mural
The pavement itself has become part of the protest.
Our Columnists
How Do We Change America?
The quest to transform this country cannot be limited to challenging its brutal police alone.
Our Columnists
Donald Trump’s Fascist Performance
To the President, power sounds like gunfire and helicopters; it sounds like the silence of men in uniform when they are asked who they are.
Dispatch
George Floyd, Houston’s Protests, and Living Without the Benefit of the Doubt
Naturally, the public conversation has turned to the question of what this moment means, and where we will go from here. But, at the end of the day, a man is dead.
