Gene Demby

The Y.N. RichKids, that crew of school-age rappers from Minneapolis, just dropped another age-appropriate banger called "The Business." Like their previous songs — they were also back last year with a minor hit called "My Bike" — "The Business" is slickly produced and thoroughly unthreatening. (Sample lyric: Don't worry ...

We've been talking a lot lately about how who fills out the Census in what way. It's an ongoing preoccupation of Code Switch, and one shared by Julie Dowling. Dowling, a University of Illinois sociologist, whose book, Mexican Americans and the Question of Race, came out earlier this ...

Sinead O'Connor's nearly 30-year career forms a portrait of an artist in conflict; a brilliant singer who remains musically, politically and personally uncompromising after forays into folk, pop, standards, reggae and points beyond. By definition, her catalog is erratic, but it's consistently bold and surprising.

On August 12, O'Connor ...

If you were watching the Miami Heat and the San Antonio Spurs face off Game 3 of the NBA Finals last night, you might have caught a surprising political spot during halftime.

The ad was released online just before the Super Bowl in late January, but last night's prime time ...

This post has been updated.

We tend to think of a race as a static thing, but it's always been much more slippery. American history has seen lots of immigrant groups that were the targets of suspicion and even racial violence — Jews, the Irish, Germans, Italians — gradually ...

EDITOR'S NOTE: This summer, we'll be regularly spotlighting sites on the National Register of Historic Places that have some significance to issues of race and culture.

The Montgomery Greyhound Station, Montgomery, Ala.

It seems odd to suggest that folks should visit a bus station if they're in the area; ...

The Tewaaraton Award is college lacrosse's equivalent of the Heisman Trophy, given to the best player in the country each year. The award takes its name from the Mohawk word for lacrosse, as a way to honor the sport's Native American origins. The bronze trophy depicts a Mohawk man with ...

The Tewaaraton Award is college lacrosse's equivalent of the Heisman Trophy, given out each year to the sport's best male and female players.

This year, Miles and Lyle Thompson, brothers from the Onondaga Nation who are teammates at the University at Albany, State University of New York, are ...

The title of Ta-Nehisi Coates' much-discussed cover story at The Atlantic, "The Case for Reparations," might be something of a misnomer.

Coates' opus is really calling for a collective reckoning with America's history, and he uses a call for reparations as the vehicle. He aims to disabuse readers of ...

The Atlantic does this a lot: use the magazine's covers to launch large, provocative conversations that you later hear endlessly dissected on cable news, in the blogosphere, and on Twitter. It is a think piece factory. You might recall Hanna Rosin's declaration that we'd reached "The End of Men," ...

Post Updated 1:45 a.m. ET Tuesday:

Macklemore posted an apology on his website late Monday. He said he picked out items that he could use to disguise himself so he could move freely around an event. "I wasn't attempting to mimic any culture, nor resemble one. A 'Jewish stereotype' ...

When New York Times publisher Arthur Sulzberger removed Jill Abramson from the paper's executive editor spot on Wednesday, it stunned the media world. Abramson was the first woman to ever fill the paper's top post and was credited with helping right its fiscal ship, and much of the early ...

One oft-employed generalization about The Kids These Days is that they've grown up free from the legalized discrimination and racial neuroses of older generations, and they will live in a more multicultural world with less racism. But do we even know if that's true?

MTV, that reliable weather vane of ...

Last week, I was having a conversation with a woman who said that her father was distrustful of people of other races. When I asked her if she considered her father a racist, she balked at the premise of the question. When I think of a racist, I think of ...

When I was growing up, my aunt used to stack dozens of magazines high on a side table at the top of her stairs. It was an accidental library of black magazines — lots of Ebony and Essence, the stray Black Enterprise here and there, but especially the digest-sized Jet. ...

While sports fan in the U.S. have been focused this week on the Donald Sterling scandal, European soccer fans have been talking about another racial incident. At a match between FC Barcelona (popularly known as Barça) and Villareal CF in Spain this past weekend, Brazilian player Dani Alves was ...

We play for each other, for our fans, and for our families — not Donald Sterling.

That was the general message that players for the Los Angeles Clippers reiterated, off-mic, when the Sterling fiasco blew up over the weekend. They were being buffeted by questions about how, exactly, they might ...

If you're a basketball nut, last week was heaven. Nearly all of the series in the first round of the NBA playoffs have been intense affairs with dramatic finishes. Several teams that barely squeaked into the postseason might upset some of the league's powerhouses. It was an uncommonly exciting week ...

Meet Cliven Bundy, a 67-year-old Nevada rancher and the latest person in public life recorded making pretty racist comments, only to later insist that they lack racist bones.

Over the past few weeks, Bundy has garnered huge amounts of media coverage and plaudits among some conservatives for defying the ...