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W.E.B. Du Bois

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Lying with Numbers

How statistics were used in the urban North to condemn Blackness as inherently criminal.

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Born enslaved, he was elected to Congress in the wake of the Civil War. But the impact of this momentous step in U.S. race relationships did not last long.
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‘A Land Where the Dead Past Walks’

Faulkner’s chroniclers have to reconcile the novelist’s often repellent political positions with the extraordinary meditations on race, violence, and cruelty in his fiction.
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The Past and Future of the Left in the Democratic Party

Centrist Democrats who blamed the left for election losses would do well to remember the people who have fought for and shaped the party’s history.

The Long Shadow of Racial Fascism

Radical Black thinkers have long argued that racial slavery created its own unique form of American fascism.
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Bringing It Back to Baldwin

Joel Rhone reviews Eddie Glaude Jr.’s Begin Again: James Baldwin’s America and its Urgent Lessons for Our Own
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Columbus Day Had Value for Italian Americans — But It’s Time to Rethink It

It helped erode discrimination but also upheld racial prejudice.
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Richard Hofstadter’s Discontents

Why did the historian come to fear the very movements he once would have celebrated?
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Rebellious History

Saidiya Hartman’s "Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments" is a strike against the archives’ silence regarding the lives of Black women in the shadow of slavery.

For the First Time, America May Have an Anti-Racist Majority

Not since Reconstruction has there been such an opportunity for the advancement of racial justice.

The Wages of Whiteness

One idea inherited from 1960s radicalism is that of “white privilege,” a protean concept invoked to explain wealth, political power, and even cognition.
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The Conceit of American Indispensability

As we mine the 1940s for alternate visions of international order, we must not presume that the US remains the benevolent center of global politics.

The Douglass Republic

How today's protests are struggling to reclaim the vision of the great abolitionist leader.
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The 1619 Project and the ‘Anti-Lincoln Tradition’

The Great Emancipator's character and anti-slavery legacy has been questioned by Black Americans for over a century.

How the Failures of the 1919 Versailles Peace Treaty Set the Stage for Today’s Anti-Racist Uprisings

In 1920, like 2020, race became the pivot of a historic turning point.
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A World “Transfixed”: The International Resonance of American Political Crises

The world's eyes are upon America as it struggles with racism and inequality. This is nothing new.

This One Letter in a Textbook Could Change How Millions of Kids Learn About Race

What the capitalization of "Black" will mean for students and their teachers.
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Trump’s Push to Skew the Census Builds on a Long History of Politicizing the Count

Who counts determines whose interests are represented in government.
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Europe in 1989, America in 2020, and the Death of the Lost Cause

A whole vision of history seems to be leaving the stage.
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American Fascism: It Has Happened Here

Americans of the interwar period were perfectly clear about one fact we have lost sight of today: all fascism is indigenous, by definition.