Jelani Cobb

A generation is still dying younger than it should—this time, of “natural causes.”

As an attorney, Derrick Bell worked on many civil-rights cases, but his doubts about their impact launched a groundbreaking school of thought.

America did exactly what the Kerner Commission on the urban riots of the mid-1960s advised against, and fifty years later reaped the consequences it predicted.

In becoming the party of Trump, the G.O.P. confronts the kind of existential crisis that has destroyed American parties in the past.

What the late civil-rights leader and congressman taught the nation.

The film's hero and antagonist represent dueling responses to five centuries of African exploitation at the hands of the West.

The belief endures, from Armstrong’s time that visible, affluent African-American entertainers are obliged to adopt a pose of ceaseless gratitude.

By ending DACA, President Trump seems to be trying to resurrect a national immigration policy defined by racial engineering.

Only by the most specific, immediate definition can we consider the Confederacy to have lost the Civil War.

What happened in Virginia was not the culminating battle of this conflict. It’s likely a tragic preface to more of the same.

The eliding of the ugliness of America's racial history is neither novel nor particularly surprising.