Langley’s Bartlebys I’m sure you’re sick of hearing about “the talking points,” but it’s fascinating to discover that the real culprit was not Susan Rice or a sinister White House plot, but, according to Siobhan Gorman and Adam Entous of the Wall Street Journal, a daylong debate at the CIA involving “more than two dozen… Read more »
January/February 2013
Wholesome Millennials—Black, Brown, and White
Prevailing stereotypes about America’s youth, and particularly about young African Americans, are often wildly off base, either because they were never true, or because they have failed to keep up with the reality of generational change. Below is a selection of social indicators showing ways in which today’s younger generation exhibits substantially more positive behaviors… Read more »
Color-Blind Medicine?
In 2002, the Institute of Medicine published an oft-cited and controversial report entitled Unequal Treatment: Confronting Racial and Ethnic Disparities in Health Care. The report concluded that members of minority groups, even when fully insured, tend to receive substandard care from their doctors. It cited disparities in how often whites and minorities received even routine… Read more »
To Live Longer, Move to a New Zip Code
Michelle Obama’s “Let’s Move” campaign emphasizes the importance of physical activity for combating obesity, a point she has driven home by dancing alongside school kids to Beyoncé’s workout video. But another kind of movement may also be important to your chances of living to a ripe old age: moving to a new zip code. Between… Read more »
The American Dream, Redeemed
How to make homeownership a safe bet for minority borrowers.
Red, White, and Black
Three generations of African American politicians.
Did Hurricane Sandy Save Obamacare?
How disaster relief justifies the welfare state.
Class No Longer Dismissed
Why some conservatives are warming to socioeconomic school integration.
COIN Operated
In Iraq and Afghanistan, General David Petraeus applied all the lessons learned in Vietnam—except for the one that mattered most.
An Arranged Marriage
Why Eisenhower distrusted, but needed, Nixon.
Dixie’s Enemy Within
How the ideology of white supremacy undermined the South’s own war effort.
A Great President for Blacks?
If you think Obama hasn’t delivered for African Americans, take a closer look at his record.
A House Divided
Why do middle-class blacks have far less wealth than whites at the same income level? The answer is in real estate and history.
The New White Negro
What it means that family breakdown is now biracial.
Thenceforward and Forever Free, Mostly
Deserving of neither blanket condemnation nor blind exaltation, Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation was a brave compromise.
Prison’s Dilemma
Even if every convict were rightly sentenced, America’s vast, racially skewed incarceration system would still be morally indefensible.
Is Inequality Shortening Your Life Span?
White, black, or brown, we’d all live longer in a more equal, less status-driven society.
Deconstructing Reconstruction
The tumultuous decade that followed the Civil War failed to enshrine black voting and civil rights, and instead paved the way for more than a century of entrenched racial injustice.
A New Role for Parole
African Americans suffer from high rates of incarceration and crime. Here’s how to drastically reduce both.
Introduction: Race, History, and Obama’s Second Term
In the summer of 2011, under siege from both the left and the right for his efforts to broker a budget deal to avoid a debt default, Barack Obama defended his leadership with a telling historical analogy. He noted that the Emancipation Proclamation, a copy of which hangs on his Oval Office wall, outlawed slavery… Read more »
Rumors of Land
The unfulfilled dream of “forty acres and a mule.”
A Dedicated Life
Shirley Sherrod’s ongoing battle for racial cooperation in Georgia.
Lincoln Died for Our Sins
The opening scene of Steven Spielberg’s cinemythic portrait of the sixteenth president features President Abraham Lincoln seated on a stage, half cloaked in darkness, and observing the Union forces he is sending into battle. It’s an apt metaphor for the man himself—both visible and obscure, inside the tempest yet somehow above the fray. Lincoln was… Read more »
The Next Affirmative Action
Want to help minority college students? Make the entire higher education system more accountable.
A Second Emancipation
One hundred years after Lincoln signed the Proclamation, Martin Luther King Jr. tried unsuccessfully to get President John F. Kennedy to issue a second one. That failure changed the course of history.
America’s Twentieth-Century Slavery
The horrifying, little-known story of how hundreds of thousands of blacks worked in brutal bondage right up until World War II.
Lincoln: No Hero to Native Americans
The Emancipation Proclamation was in many ways a tremendous step forward for human rights, but it didn’t bring any new rights to Native Americans. In fact, Abraham Lincoln is not seen as much of a hero at all among many American Indian tribes and Native peoples of the United States, as the majority of his… Read more »
Emmett and Trayvon
How racial prejudice in America has changed in the last sixty years.
