Civil rights

Visits from the Goon Squad

From behaviors of Little Rock, Arkansas, police, cited by the department since 2007. The internal reports were made public in October, following an investigation of the killing of Bobby Moore,…

Checkpoint Nation

By Melissa del Bosque,

Laura Sandoval threaded her way through idling taxis and men selling bottles of water toward the entrance of the Cordova International Bridge, which links Ciudad Juárez, Mexico, to El Paso,…

Political Football

By Kevin Baker,

With the fall and another election season upon us, the one thing we can count on is a renewal of Donald Trump’s war on football. This has become an annual…

Empty Suits

By Ian MacDougall,

The stench first hit me on US 80, just past the catfish feed mill and the processing plant next door. It was late March in Uniontown, Alabama, a whistle-stop thirty…

A Matter of Degrees

By Michael S. Collins,

According to the prophecy, we are in the last days when race will matter in the molding of American citizens. This particular prophecy was made in 2003 by Sandra Day…

Confirmation B.S.

From a quiz drafted by the police department of Long Beach, California, and used as part of a training presentation. The quiz was cited in a report by the A.C.L.U.…

Southern Harm

By William Faulkner,

We are faced with two apparently irreconcilable facts in the South: the one being the decree of our national government that there be absolute equality in education among all citizens,…

The Immunity Doctrine

By Julia Harte,

On October 13, 2001, Ibrahim Turkmen answered a knock on the door of his home in West Babylon, New York, to find two FBI agents. A solemn man with a…

Travel Clearances

From descriptions of incidents in which U.S. and U.K. airlines removed Muslims or passengers who were perceived to be Muslim from their flights. Read More

Tyranny of the Minority

By Rebecca Solnit,

Think of our democracy as a house we built in 1776, big enough only for Christian, property-owning white men. Over the next two centuries, various groups struggled to make it…

Black Like Who?

By Calvin Baker,

I first heard the name Barack Obama in the spring of 2004, while visiting my mother in Chicago. As we sat around the kitchen table early one spring morning, I…

From the Archive

Got it! Thanks for signing up!