When Julian Jackson checked his phone’s Facebook livestream and saw the U.S. Border Patrol convoy snaking north up Lakeshore Dr. toward his Chicago neighborhood, he headed toward Lake Michigan to catch the caravan from behind.
I was sitting with the Afrocentric rapstress Magia López Cabrera in her modest Havana walk-up in June when Cuba’s prominent black-history scholar Tomás Fernández Robaina showed up for a café con leche. It felt like the Cuban equivalent of Cornel West dropping in on Queen Latifah.
When the discussion warms up in Andrea Cote-Botero’s graduate seminar, English and Spanish flow freely, just as they do amid the afternoon foot traffic across the nearby Ciudad Juárez border.
Explores the first-ever national high school curriculum on Black studies.
Some therapists are guiding white clients to explore their racial prejudice, shame, anger and isolation, and then carry their insights into anti-racist action.
I studied high schools in Berkeley, Chapel Hill and Ann Arbor (where I graduated a generation ago) to learn why school racial inequality, as measured by achievement test scores, is so disproportionately large in socially progressive college towns.
Spending a month at Selma High in Alabama offered me a research opportunity to question the prevailing assumption that an all-Black public school is a failure because it embodies the shameful collapse of the post-1954 integration promise. My investigative question was whether such a school can leverage its racially unified character to help students develop their identities and strengthen their learning.
Spending a month at Selma High in Alabama offered me a research opportunity to question the prevailing assumption that an all-Black public school is a failure because it embodies the shameful collapse of the post-1954 integration promise. My investigative question was whether such a school can leverage its racially unified character to help students develop their identities and strengthen their learning.
Where is the schoolhouse door that opens to the divine realm of dreams, the contours of grief, the light of intuition, the sense of connection to the rivers? Perhaps love and the inner life do not seem like subjects students could possibly explore at a desk, on a computer, or in a lab.
Inside the locker room of a professional sports team somewhere in America, a player may well be struggling to decide whether he is ready to come out publicly as a gay man. No professional male athlete active in the country’s four prime-time team sports–football, baseball, basketball and hockey–ever has.
Supporting the emerging work of the torture treatment movement challenges the belief that individual citizens have no power to address the grave injury of torture inflicted beyond our borders.
Two weeks after a year of urban high school teaching, I sat down to calculate how many hours a week it would take to leave no child behind. That’s no child out of 150, since last year I taught five classes a day, averaging 30 students a class.
Virtually no U.S. student could tell you that King visited Jamaica in 1965 and publicly extolled your great national hero, Marcus Garvey. Laying a wreath on the leader’s grave, King declared, “Garvey was the first man of colour in the history of the United States to give millions of Negroes a sense of dignity and destiny.”
Patois is the Jamaican language of everyday life and has global cachet through dancehall music. But it suffers the stigma of being inferior to English. Is the government’s unwillingness to recognize it as an official national language a form of discrimination?
At the end of a morning visit to Havana’s Julio Mella Middle School four weeks ago, I exchanged books with a teacher. She gave me a worn copy of an American history text and I gave her a book of Alice Walker poems.
I love Alicia’s uninhibited sexuality, but I love more this new, subtly intimate expression, like we might be standing together in the same room reflecting on our lives.
Trinidad and Tobago, a twin island nation of 1.3 million people off the coast of Venezuela, is known more for high-intensity soca music and blowout Carnivals. But it is slowly building its Olympic brand to emerge from the leggy shadows of its higher-profile rivals, Jamaica and the U.S.
In the days after Hurricane Katrina, the band members from the Soul Rebels Brass Band, who were dispersed from Texas to South Carolina and beyond, made a pledge over their cell phones to keep their weekly Thursday night gigs at Le Bon Temps Roulé.
Speeding on a packed rush-hour Metrobus from La Bombilla (Lightbulb) station for Chilpancingo (Wasp), I suddenly imagined myself as one of countless urban particles carrying this city’s vital energies.
One morning, twenty-four years ago on a rocky Robben Island beach, I foraged for a stone to transcribe the poem that had come to me during a nearly sleepless night.
The women slide through stalled traffic, balancing on their colorful headscarves baskets of plantains for sale, or groundnuts or shampoo flasks.
On a front lawn off Detroit’s Jefferson Avenue, 11-year-old Tania displays dolls dressed in colorful, hand-designed African fashions. “My grandmother buys them and gets fabric to make the outfits,” Tania says, reporting that on this day, sales are up with spillover traffic from the free Jazzin’ on Jefferson festival.
A sea otter floating beside your kayak in Monterey Bay demonstrates a deft technique for cracking open a gaper clam.
If you drop in to New York for a weekend, here’s how to tap into Harlem’s rich black heritage, which begins at the mecca of African American music, the Apollo Theater.
Barack Obama has been openly fantasizing in the press for months now about replacing the White House bowling alley with a basketball court…
Like their upbeat, New York-bred authors, the novels Neruda on the Park and Halsey Street converse like sisterly companions.
The National Book Award–winning author of South to America takes us on another lyrical journey through history in this exploration of “the mystery of blue and its alchemy in the lives of Black folk.”
I am the moderator for a conversation with book critics, editors and creative writers about what it means to be a racially-conscious book critic and what intellectual and personal preparation work racially-conscious critics need to do.
A presentation of my journalism on race equity in education, Africana curriculum and journalistic practice questions that arise in the reporting process.
Another Country does not celebrate interracial love; it suggests only its fragile possibility, showing a racial America stripped bare, often literally. But the essential and enduring promise for these wounded characters is that, despite their defenses and denials, they speak and they witness each other’s wrenching racial truths. Their tense dialogues on race, layered with explorations of gay sexuality, remain radical nearly 60 years later.
Across three decades as philosophical frontman for the Roots, Tariq Trotter (a.k.a. Black Thought) has composed such an expansive catalogue of keen social commentary and gritty introspection that his verse constitutes a biography in itself.
When white mobs in New Orleans massacred over two hundred African Americans on July 30, 1866, among the marauders was embittered white militia member Constant Lecorgne.
Imagine that the single most influential piece of modern American music — a tour de force that spans classical, opera, Indigenous, Latin, folk, jazz and blues — was not, as claimed, the work of a White man but stolen from a homeless Black woman with a mental disability.
Readers of Victor LaValle’s horror-tinged novels are used to careening across a New York City seeded with supernatural creatures.
Human beings are autobiographers by nature. Whether or not we ultimately write down any words, we can’t help mentally composing narratives out of our emotionally messy lives, attempting to seam coherence from chaos.
The first Nicole Sealey poem I ever read opened with a simple declarative neutrality that hit me with riveting force—“I’ve been pregnant.”
The night Safiya Sinclair first openly opposes her abusive father and the Rastafari strictures in which he has confined their family for years, she stands alone on a porch and watches a specter rise in the nighttime chill.
They both silently imagine a first kiss while flirting cautiously in the open air of an empty stadium. But in Nigeria, sometimes a shuttered room is the only place queer boys can dare to become men.
A novel that careens magically across the American landscape, shifting ingeniously between literary styles, as it charts the trail of impaired loves in two uprooted families.
In the multi-generational ensemble of women who narrate Deesha Philyaw’s story collection, The Secret Lives of Church Ladies (2020) teenage Jael most deftly poses the core existential question— “Can you suck dicks and still be saved?”
Via the body, she wrenches us into sensuous and traumatic narratives that express hunger for love, rage at violation, the turmoil of illness, and an exquisite wish for restoration.
Inside his backpack at Yale Law School, as he aimed to become a public defender, 17 years after being imprisoned for a carjacking he committed at age 16, poet Reginald Dwayne Betts kept a sheaf of handwritten letters penned by an executed man named Glenn McGinnis.
While Ed Pavlic’s recently published study of Adrienne Rich’s poetry numbers about 200 pages, their 12-year weekly correspondence lasting until Rich’s death in 2012 amounts to much more.
Three millennial writers probe inner male conflict while the patriarch Achebe looks on.
Embracing My Shadow is an inspiring testimony suffused in sensuality that illustrates how a young woman can find oases of erotic joy even amidst a severely homophobic society.
The young Nigerian men who inhabit Arinze Ifeakandu’s tender story collection God’s Children Are Little Broken Things wish deeply to be known.
Nearly a century ago, John Steinbeck indelibly placed California’s Salinas Valley on the literary map with his sunbaked, realist narratives of working-class life that ranged from quaint humor to stark tragedy. Short story writer Jaime Cortez joins Steinbeck as a Salinas Valley native son depicting working-class life.
Journalism, it is often said, is the first draft of history…
A discussion on literary forebears, gentrification, racial divides, lonely trumpets, kids who gotta grow up before their time and Nola-speak.
Edwidge Danticat writes about death, even the most brutal, with a lyricism that reminds us of a primal paradox—within the deepest violence and loss, the life-force reasserts itself.
I’m sure it wasn’t coincidental, when I phoned Alice Walker at her northern California home in August, to find her gardening. Flowers are perhaps the most common motif in her fifty-year catalog of poetry.
Days after a bicycle crash that would erase her memory for two months, Ingrid Rojas Contreras answered her phone and heard the voice of a woman she presumably didn’t know, but who sounded oddly familiar—her mother.
The co-editors of the only international press devoted exclusively to publishing African poetry discuss their vision.
Working from her recently re-issued novel In Dependence, we considered different ways that Nigerian, British, and American readers may experience the complex interplay of race, culture, nationality and history.
Eight prominent bilingual US writers, including Edwidge Danticat, Junot Díaz and Julia Alvarez, discuss how they approach their dual-language craft as they navigate identity between a childhood lived in one tongue and adulthood lived in another.
In the United States, where contemporary fiction often explores deep questions of race, class, gender, and sexuality, writers who fashion characters outside their identities invariably surface deep questions about who has the power to shape public narratives of identity, putting any artist with vision into vulnerable territory.
Ed Pavlić is driving I-85 through South Carolina in a rainstorm when he hears the NPR report of yet another racist murder.
At first, I didn’t recognize the girl’s elongated arm. The photo is cropped at the shoulder and there is no visible face.
A Palestinian man searches for connection with the soil as Israeli West Bank settlements close in, all viewed from the level of the wildflowers and wadis.
(Excerpt from the book-in-progress Jewfro American: An Interracial Memoir)
Grandpa’s Harlem began at Stebbins Tool & Die factory, six blocks from the Apollo Theater, in 1946, the year he learned the fate of his family back in Poland.
My first day in Prague, the day they ordered the Marines into Los Angeles, I was sipping ginger tea at Václav Havel’s regular table in Café Slavia.
One day in the last few weeks of his life, when he was having frequent coughing spasms, my father and I explicated Shakespeare’s Sonnet 71.
“What, you’re wondering if I’ll keep this up for my second half century?” I said, scanning the circle. I had no words to answer the question truthfully. There was too much love in the room. At that point I was considering killing myself before I reached 51, maybe with a vial of Phenobarbital.
Stitching these lists together convinces me I can capture the full fabric of my life, a testament of my essence. I want to believe that joy can be enumerated, grief segmented, and love classified. I want a life that is lyrical, and also measurable.
Anyone searching for my parents in a telephone directory would likely overlook the spelling difference between my mother’s and father’s surnames.
Before the onset of the High Holy Days, I found myself recounting conversations with my many friends still persevering in the quest to find romantic partnerships.
(Excerpt from the book-in-progress Jewfro American: An Interracial Memoir)
Grandpa’s Harlem began at Stebbins Tool & Die factory, six blocks from the Apollo Theater, in 1946, the year he learned the fate of his family back in Poland.
One day in the last few weeks of his life, when he was having frequent coughing spasms, my father and I explicated Shakespeare’s Sonnet 71.
“What, you’re wondering if I’ll keep this up for my second half century?” I said, scanning the circle. I had no words to answer the question truthfully. There was too much love in the room. At that point I was considering killing myself before I reached 51, maybe with a vial of Phenobarbital.
Stitching these lists together convinces me I can capture the full fabric of my life, a testament of my essence. I want to believe that joy can be enumerated, grief segmented, and love classified. I want a life that is lyrical, and also measurable.
Anyone searching for my parents in a telephone directory would likely overlook the spelling difference between my mother’s and father’s surnames.
Before the onset of the High Holy Days, I found myself recounting conversations with my many friends still persevering in the quest to find romantic partnerships.
Performance at Bogobiri House open mic, Lagos, Nigeria, June 22, 2022
I too fell prey to the delusion /
Social Justice