Award-winning novelist C. E. Morgan talks about "moral beauty," evil and empathy, and how landscape informs her work, including her latest, "The Sport of Kings."
How can injustice be remedied when it is invisible? White Catholics—and indeed all white people—must learn how racism perpetuates black suffering and death.
An outrage was perpetrated against voters in Arizona, and we can't ignore the warning that the disenfranchisement of thousands of its citizens offers our nation.
Not all criticism of the president is racially motivated. But a lot of it has been, which is important to note in a campaign marked by appeals to racial resentment.
A fixation on slashing government spending on services without regard to the effect on the basic well-being of citizens helped bring the Flint crisis about.
How to cut through the entitlement or ambivalence of college students and get them to see the connections between economics, ethics, inequality, and oppression?
Andrew Hartman's argument is that while “cultural conflict persists,” it has come to partake of a highly ironic flavor—and continues to ignore economic inequality.
In Ta-Nehisi Coates’s interpretation of race in America, hope doesn't fit into the narrative—something James Baldwin, to whom he's compared, wouldn't leave out.
What fascinates Maraniss about Detroit more than its ruin is how central its story is to the broader course of U.S. history—Motown, the local Mob, the auto industry.
'Go Set Watchman' shows that though Atticus Finch defended a black man in court, he was still a man of his time—on the white citizens council, resisting integration.
Claudia Rankine’s 'Citizen' and Jeffery Renard Allen’s 'Song of the Shank' both take up the issue of race in America in jagged and beautiful poetry and prose.
While my husband snapped photos of the flag, I stood in silent debate with Big Ed. And then I spied another Confederate flag; an unwelcome sensation came over me.
The African-American Christian tradition has been vital in our history for reasons of the spirit but also as a reminder that the Bible is a subversive book.
Chicago, 1932. The night before he would knock Ernie Schaaf unconscious, the second time a fighter would die from one of Max’s blows. We were standing at the bar.
The core liberal conviction about the Supreme Court still rings true: it is most constructive when power is used to vindicate the rights of beleaguered minorities.
Amusing and engaging, Barney Frank's stories (from sixteen terms in Congress) tell what kinds of “inside politicking” informed the presidencies of LBJ through Obama.
Paul Moses's history of Irish-Italian relations in 19th century New York delves into the causes for "race war" between the immigrant groups and how they overcame it.
Right away, anyone who wants to discuss the implications of the shooting is scolded for “politicizing a tragedy.” Thus debate is delayed until the urgency passes.
The pattern of income inequality is more than a social problem, Robert Putnam says; it's a social tragedy, most devastating in the lives of poor American children.
Iranian author Azar Nafiri defends the value of canonical American literature—its imagination and humanity—against Common Core, market analyses, and Babbitt.
At the 126-year old Catholic Church in Freddie Gray's neighborhood, where structural sin can be fatal, parishioners find ways to work for justice, not just charity.
Pinckney's short history deals with basic things—Reconstruction, Ku Klux Klan terrorism, crude political machinations like Plessy v Ferguson—white people can forget.
Baltimore is Exhibit A for the frustration over how the costs of globalization and technological change have been borne almost entirely by the least advantaged.
The political activist, public intellectual, and "father of modern linguistics" talks about Oscar Romero, Old Testament prophets, and the politics of fear.
Lawrence painted what he saw and what he knew: strivers and beggars, children and prostitutes, gamblers and preachers, and above all women, like his mother.
'Selma' dramatizes one moment in the civil-rights movement when Martin Luther King, wracked by doubts and intimations of mortality, could have put his goals on hold.
