Shaun King is a 36-year-old Atlanta-based activist who has played a prominent role in anti-racism movements such as Black Lives Matter. He publicly identifies as “black or biracial” and is the son, according to a 2012 profile, of “a Caucasian mother and an African-American father.” Yesterday, however, the nativist…

Without dwelling on the progressive policies of decades past, and how they sometimes failed the communities they were designed to safeguard, I’d like to discuss an editorial written by my colleague, Hamilton Nolan (“Don’t Piss on Your Best Friend”), which argues against the recent protest of Bernie Sanders by…

On Saturday, Bernie Sanders was scheduled to speak to a crowd of thousands of supporters in a Seattle park. He never did; the event was shut down after a handful of protesters disrupted it in the name of “Black Lives Matter.” This was remarkably dumb.

If the purpose of protest is to move the needle of public opinion on a particular issue, the Black Lives Matter movement can be considered a success so far, according to a new Washington Post poll. If the poll’s numbers are accurate, many more Americans are concerned about black rights than were a year ago, before…

New York Attorney Gen. Eric Schneiderman will investigate the death of Raynette Turner, who was found dead in a Mount Vernon jail cell on August 27. This will be Schneiderman’s first case since being named special prosecutor for police-related civilian deaths. Turner was the fifth black woman to die in police custody…

For the past two weeks, I have carried Sandra Bland with me everywhere I go. At first, it was a smiling image of her that haunted my thoughts; she is dressed in what looks to be a black blazer and white blouse, one of her baby locs creeping out of place and sitting squarely on her forehead. She’s wearing big earrings,…

The night after Michael Brelo was acquitted for the 2012 shooting death of unarmed Timothy Russell and Malissa Williams, I started writing. There is a certain burden of clarity and urgency that hangs over the writer, which he or she must ultimately answer to. But the weight of things was especially heavy this night.…

There will be no justice for Rekia Boyd, the 22-year-old unarmed Chicago woman who was fatally shot by an off-duty cop in 2012.

I read Akiba Solomon for the first time in the early 2000s when she was a senior editor at The Source magazine. While Akiba's penchant for crafting sentences was on par with some of the greatest scribes of that era, it was her ability to structure features, interviews, and investigative pieces that made the…

We’re celebrating the Fourth of July at my cousin’s McMansion in Lake Mary, Florida, a short stroll across a golf course to the Sanford line. I’m surrounded by kinfolk I haven’t seen since the last funeral. We’re sipping sweet wine, Baileys, and beer. We’re telling the stories we always tell, and stories I’ve never…

Few young creative writers in our world write so curiously and honestly out of our varied black American literary tradition as Andrew Elias Colarusso. The biracial son of an Afro-Puerto Rican mother and an Italian American father; Andrew writes, "Because I did and do have a loving relationship with my (white)…

I met Marlon Peterson in 2009, a few months after he'd completed ten years of a 12-year sentence for first degree assault and third degree weapons possession. While Marlon was inside, I read his blog and some of the correspondences he'd exchanged with Nadia Lopez's eighth graders. I was amazed not simply by Marlon's…

Growing up in a predominantly white, middle-class neighborhood in Seattle I remember my mother warning my older brother not to be caught running after dark, and, if ever stopped by police, to do whatever they asked—no more and no less. Speak as little as possible, she'd say. Every suggestion was a weak attempt to…

When a friend introduced me to the work of a theoretical physicist named Dr. Chanda Hsu Prescod-Weinstein, I had no idea what a "theoretical physicist" was. Whatever the work of theoretical physicists, I didn't imagine that there was one in our country who would say to a group of grad students at MIT, "Do not be…

There isn't enough ink to express our pain. Day after day, month after month, year after year, the pain of being black in America, and across the globe, is apparent. Yesterday I read the headlines and tweets that told me NYPD Officer Daniel Pantaleo, the cop that killed Eric Garner, would not be indicted. Daniel…

At a September townhall meeting in Harlem, Carl Dix, a longtime Uptown fixture and mouthpiece, stood before the microphone in the auditorium of the Schomburg Center and called for mass rebellion. "It's going to take a revolution," he said, "nothing less, to end this and the horrors of the system once and for all."