10 Things You Should Know About Slavery and Won’t Learn at ‘Django’

by Imara Jones on January 9 2013, 10:02AM

Slavery as revenge fantasy is a far cry from the ugly truth: Slavery as the economic engine that created the inequitable world in which we still live.

Topics: 'Django', Economy, History

10444 Comments

Hollywood’s Slavery Films Tell Us More About the Present Than the Past

by Dexter Gabriel on January 9 2013, 9:37AM

“Django Unchained” and “Lincoln” share a long history of Hollywood epics that feed our modern myths and expectations back to us, rather than genuinely explore our history.

Topics: 'Django', Arts & Culture, History

10438 Comments

What Would Michele Bachmann Think of Your Family? [Reader Forum]

by Channing Kennedy on July 18 2011, 9:13AM

The GOP is pedaling away from a racially toxic family values pledge. Will this be the end of social conservative racebaiting (for this week)? Readers chime in.

Topics: Politics

7224 Comments

Daughter of Slaves Not Recognized as World’s Oldest Woman

by Thoai Lu on March 29 2011, 11:45AM

Rebecca Lanier is 119 years old but, like most black Americans of her time, was never issued a birth certificate.

Topics: History

6554 Comments

Mapping America’s Brutal Past, and Humanity’s Capacity for Revolt

by Imara Jones on January 19 2011, 10:12AM

An 1860 census of the American South reveals much more than the region’s demography.

Topics: History

6105 Comments

Ground Zero’s Slave Graves

by Jamilah King on August 27 2010, 3:38PM

The bones of some 20,000 African slaves are buried 25 feet below Lower Manhattan.

Topics:

5331 Comments

Henry Louis Gates’ Dangerously Wrong Slave History

by Barbara Ransby on May 3 2010, 12:00PM

The celebrity academic’s New York Times editorial is not only a disservice to history, it comes at exactly the wrong time in our discourse on race.

Topics: History

581 Comments

Perversion of Justice: Citizens United, Corporate Power and Black Disenfranchisement

by Michelle Chen on January 25 2010, 5:56AM

Corporations are people, too. That was the logic behind the Supreme Court’s latest assault on the electoral process. Divined from a wildly creative reading of the law, the concept has been manipulated over the years to grant extraordinary powers…

Topics: Politics

4314 Comments

In Health Debate, GOP Plays the Slavery Card—and Loses

by Michelle Chen on December 8 2009, 8:18AM

Conservatives on the Hill were shocked—shocked!—when Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid compared conservatives’ obstructionism on health care reform to resistance, in an earlier era, to the abolition of that “peculiar institution.” “Outrageous!” cried Rush Limbaugh, following up with a…

Topics: Health, Politics

4196 Comments