James Baldwin

Two new books and one expanded edition of Gordon Parks' photographs look at the work of the photographer from the 1940s, 1950s and 1960s.

The personal essay is the purest expression of the lie that individual subjectivity exists prior to the social formations that gave rise to it.

What my father saw in Mississippi.

Taking seriously the midlife crisis.

The “racial” distinctions between master and slave may be more familiar to Americans, but they were and are no more real than those between Gentile and Jew.

Racial blamelessness and the politics of forgetting.

American innocence, the possession of history, and January 6, 2021.

The very American racism of the notorious late Rabbi Meir Kahane.

A guide for the perplexed, the puzzled, and the politically confused.

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

"My job as your mother is to tell you these stories differently, and to tell you other stories that don’t get told at school.”

The murderous hysteria over white patrimony is inseparable from the private capture of both economic opportunity and political authority.

In the 1950s and 1960s, a new generation of American artists began to think of advertising and commercial imagery as the new avant-garde.

Most Black Tulsans in 1921 were working class. But these days, it seems like the fate of those few blocks in and around “Black Wall Street” is all that matters.

In ‘The Free World: Art and Thought in the Cold War,’ Louis Menand explores the poetry, music, painting, dance and film that emerged during the Cold War.

The New Yorker critic's new book is a sequel of sorts to "The Metaphysical Club."

A musicological conversation about the history and social value of Black music.

More diverse regular history classes are the key to a historically literate population.

A lethal incident of police brutality in Miami in 1979 offers just one of countless examples of the reality generations of African Americans have faced.

Cuts to public services that might mitigate poverty and promote social mobility have become a perpetual excuse for more policing.