Tag: African Americans

The singer’s latest performance helps expand the possibilities of what it looks like to be a black thinking person.

Why Kanye referenced a nonexistent slave owner.

A desperate veteran, missing his disability payment, walked into a bank and took several people hostage. This is how he got there.

Lessons of race, blackness and power from a self-described nerdy Black girl.

America’s first black millionaires were born into slavery — and built wealth alongside political power.

Hill rice was supposed to be extinct, until a South Carolina chef stumbled on it — in Trinidad.

The disturbing parallels between professional football and the business of pimping

Shalon Irving was educated, insured, and well-supported by family and friends. She still became a casualty of missed opportunities and neglect by healthcare providers.

How the whiplash-like event of Trump following the nation’s first black president has “compressed time.”

The new poetry editor of the New Yorker says that to find poetry, “you have to look in your backyard.”

The space has become a vital convening point for creatives, culture workers, and audiences interested in ideas of black excellence.

Women of color who have been singled out by sexual predators deserve our collective fury too.

The modern hip-hop classic reflects growing up in Compton “one thousand percent.”

Building a fashion empire in a country that’s still conservative about sexuality and female agency.

Blueberry growing is popular around tiny Covert, Michigan, but how do these farmers of color keep their kids farming the land?

In one simple sentence in 1914, Columbus Bragg, an African American writer, helped codify the Blues genre, though he’s largest forgotten.

For the Undefeated, music writer and essayist Bruce Britt offers a compelling history of soul band Maze.

‘Cane’ is a series of vignettes about life in rural Georgia told from the point of view of an ambivalently black teacher from the north.

The author talks with The Paris Review about writing, crime fiction, and his depiction of Black American life.

The Black Alliance for Just Immigration helps those affected by racial profiling and harsh immigration laws.

At Guernica, Katherina Grace Thomas turns a lens on the years Nina Simone spent in Liberia in the mid-1970s.

At Harper’s, Smith doesn’t really feel like she is engaging in her subject matter with much care or heart.

For talented black spellers in the 1960s, the segregated local spelling bee was the beginning and the end of the long road to Washington, D.C.

Taiye Selasi, Yaa Gyasi, and Toyin Ojin Odutola expand notions of blackness with layered, nuanced artwork.

Daniel Patterson, and the challenges of bringing fast healthy food to the impoverished neighborhoods trapped in food deserts.

Oakland writer Carvell Wallace travels to Elko, Nevada, for the National Cowboy Poetry Gathering and reflects on what it means to be black and American.

Looking at Amanda Petrusich’s 2013 Oxford American magazine story about blues singer Bessie Smith.

In 2008, Vanity Fair published a story about a guitar salesman named Steven Schein, who found a photograph of Robert Johnson, the world’s most influential Bluesman, for sale on eBay for $25. The photo was mislabeled “Old Snapshot Blues Guitar B.B. King???”. Only two photos of Johnson had been publicly released. The article is about […]

As a white woman, my role in conversations about race is to listen and learn. This week, I wanted to include pieces about empowerment, stereotypes and intersection in the realm of race. One reading list cannot encompass the vast array of experiences of black Americans; this is not meant to be exhaustive. Send me your […]