Race

A post-pandemic fight about racism, the respectful treatment of trans kids, and the role of teachers’ unions has divided Amherst, Massachusetts.

“American Fiction,” nominated for five Academy Awards, satirizes the literary world, and upends Hollywood conventions about Blackness.

Todd Haynes’s new film on Netflix reveals how race and class shaped the real-world case that inspired it.

Laquvia Jones lost both of her sons to shootings. Now she wonders why a city with a deep sense of community—and one of the wealthiest universities in the world—can’t figure out how to address gun violence. 

Robert Samuels discusses his recent reporting on the South Carolina senator and Presidential candidate.

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.

They said we had too much white blood, we were not dark enough.

The public-health professor Arline T. Geronimus has spent a forty-year career researching how inequality takes a “weathering” toll on the body.

The playwright behind “The Thanksgiving Play” discusses her satire of theatre and U.S. history, the enduring prevalence of “redface” in casting, and how a background in ballet made her a better writer.

A proposed change to the census faces opposition from Afro-Latino groups, and exposes conflicts among Latino communities.

The conservative majority may strike down consideration of race in school admissions. What will that mean for colleges? Plus, how the culture wars came to the Catholic Church.

The multi-hyphenate discusses her role in “Till”; her approach to art; ego death; and the retrograde values of the Hollywood system.

The comedian and host of “The Amber Ruffin Show” (and author, writer for “Late Night with Seth Meyers,” “Drunk History” guest, and book writer for three musicals) discusses mining laughs from racism.

The second season of Terence Nance’s HBO series scrutinizes the nature of artistic collaboration while developing a visionary exploration of Black American life. 

The show didn’t appeal to me when it first aired, mostly because I harbored a long-simmering antagonism toward mainstream America.

Two boys find each other across racial lines in Jamaica.

“Black Adam” and the slippery identities of Dwayne Johnson.

For the women in Shenny De Los Angeles’s family, hair relaxers meant a mix of beauty and pain. Going natural was both a privilege and a liberation.

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.

Its founders believe that they can use the tools of the Western art world to help heal the effects of more than a century of plunder.