Gene Demby

Here are some things we've been musing on over the last few days. Share yours on Twitter or shout us out in the comments below.

"We shine because they hate us/floss 'cuz they degrade us." After two young, black customers accused the high-end retailer Barneys of racially profiling them after ...

Last week, folks told us that that they found odd resonances in their lives with the stories of several Roma children in Europe who'd separated from their families. Like those blond, blue-eyed Roma children in darker-skinned, dark-haired families, people said that their own familial bonds had occasionally come under ...

Several recent cases of suspected kidnapping involving the Roma in Europe have had some some odd but peculiar resonances for 21st-century American life.

In one case, the police received a tip that a blond, blue-eyed girl was living with a Roma family in a Dublin suburb. The tipster believed that ...

If you're not a big college football fan, you may have missed the story of an unprecedented player revolt.

The players at Grambling State University, a historically black university in Louisiana, were angry about a bunch of things. Their beloved coach, the former NFL quarterback Doug Williams, was sacked ...

On Monday, the folks over at Reddit were kind enough to have my colleague Shereen Marisol Meraji and me on to do an Ask Me Anything on our recent reporting on Bluefield State College in West Virginia. Bluefield State is a historically black college, but today it's nearly 90 ...

Jeffrey Babbitt was walking through Union Square last Wednesday, near the Manhattan comic book store that he'd been going to for years, when he had a fatal chance encounter with a stranger.

The stranger was a man named Lashawn MartenMartin Redrick, who had a history of trouble with the ...

Note: This post discusses and includes a racial slur. Be warned.

At a church near Charlotte, N.C., a pastor recently sent out a note to her congregants asking for greeters — but only greeters of a certain kind.

"We are continuing to work to bring our racial demographic ...

Editor's Note: This a post about a racial slur, and there's no way around using it. Just a heads up.

The impulse to make the world neat and simple, with hard and fast guidelines, bumps up against the messiness of real life all the time.

Earlier this week, a ...

Here's the latest dispatch from our country's changing classrooms: Overall, there were half a million fewer students nationwide enrolled in colleges between 2011 and 2012, but the number of Latinos enrolled in college over the same period jumped by 447,000. The numbers come from a recent U.S. Census Bureau ...

This a post about a racial slur, and there's no way around using it. Be warned.

Is it racist if a black boss calls his black employee nigger?

A federal jury in New York thinks so.

The jury awarded Brandi Johnson $30,000 in punitive damages (in addition to $250,000 in ...

Dave Chappelle has become a kind of mythical figure ever since 2005, when he abruptly walked away from the spotlight and a reported $50 million to continue making episodes of his hit sketch comedy show. He'll pop up at some seemingly random venue in front of a surprised audience, ...

So people have been hitting us up on Twitter and asking us to weigh in on the disasterpiece that was Miley Cyrus' performance at Sunday's MTV Video Music Awards. Perhaps you've heard someone mention it? There was twerking and teddy bears and boatloads of, uh, racial tone deafness.

Part ...

Maybe it was the dreary weather and the many older folks who had the good VIP seats on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial, but Wednesday afternoon's commemoration of the March on Washington's 50th anniversary felt like a valediction for the civil rights generation.

They made this world possible and ...

Wednesday marks the 50th celebration of the March on Washington — perhaps you've heard something about it? — and it's a little hard to resist the urge to compare the America of 1963 to 2013, to see how they've diverged.

Although the "I have a dream" and the "content of ...

The national conversation around immigration has shifted dramatically over the past decade. That's in large part because of activists who have pushed to change the narrative around the undocumented.

"If you asked your typical soccer mom what she thought of an unauthorized immigrant, she says, 'Well, I think of Mexicans ...

Hip-hop's Big Bang exploded four decades ago this week at a party that Kool Herc threw at 1520 Sedgwick Ave. in the Bronx, N.Y. The legend goes that this was the first time someone had ever scratched turntables while an MC rhymed over a breakbeat. It was from that ...

Judge Shira Scheindlin has earned a reputation as an outspoken defender of civil liberties and a recurring foil for the New York City police. In her ruling in the closely watched stop-and-frisk case, Scheindlin criticized the police, and said the department discriminated against blacks and Latinos. She also said ...

Not long ago, we wrote about The Talk, the conversation that many young men of color get from their parents about how to manage being seen as suspicious and navigate fraught encounters with police officers. It's why Nicholas Peart's story resonated with us. Peart, who lives in Harlem, was ...

We've decided to take a weekly look at a word or phrase that's caught our attention, whether for its history, usage, etymology or just because it has an interesting story.

NOTE TO READERS: This is a post about one of the harshest racial slurs in American English. In the ...

Let's coin a new stereotype right here: Latinos are mad friendly.

Ninety percent of Latinos said that they are friends with people of a different race, according to new poll from Reuters and Ipsos, making them much more likely than the rest of America to reach across racial lines ...