Race

“How Faculty of Color Hurt Their Careers Helping Universities with Diversity”

“The failure of many top schools to make significant progress on diversity can mean that institutions are relying too heavily on a tiny fraction of the higher education community to smooth over…

“What The Kanye Controversy Can Teach Us About Black Voters”

“What White and and three other researchers found in a recent study is that social pressure from other black people is how this Democratic norm gets policed. They found that the expectations around this norm were so powerful…

“What is white culture, exactly? Here’s what the stats say”

“You don’t notice normalcy; you see the deviations from it. So the word “white” could always be hopped over as an adjective.

Now, “white” still feels like an absence: an absence of color, an absence of…

“The Plague of ‘Whiteness’”

“But hold on. Let’s not move too quickly to sense-making; as we’ll see, it isn’t always our ally…

There is always a point in the life of white-supremacy and imperialism where the sense-making apparatuses breakdown. There is no mystery about the fact that…

“In ‘The Price for Their Pound of Flesh,’ black bodies matter”

“Berry pays systematic attention to the ways in which the enslaved sought to counteract the ruthless economic exploitation of their bodies and labor. Focusing closely on how slaves were valued from conception to their…

“What Doctors Should Ignore”

“Today, scientists understand the sickle cell trait as an adaptation to malaria, not evidence of inferiority. One copy of the sickle cell trait protects against malaria. Having two can cause severe anemia and even death. Scientists also know that the trait is common outside…

“Defense of Our Sins”

“The central question of Kendrick Lamar’s Good Kid, M.A.A.D. City has always seemed simple to me: Can a good person become victim to their own circumstances and still survive? It’s a question the album poses to the outside world, but it’s also a question that has echoed through…

“Black Women Deserve Real Love, Too”

“To some, Black women are not afforded the luxury of finding a better relationship. Black women are not worthy of magical love stories. Successful love stories for Black women are marked solely by our ability to endure suffering and continue to stand with partners…

“Thomas Pynchon Shows Us How White Writers Can Avoid Appropriation”

“You learn about the way the Germans tortured the Hereros, the way they killed them — and you learn it from the point of view of a German character, Kurt Mondaugen. This deliberate choice is part of Pynchon’s…