Gene Demby

Gene Demby appears in the following:

George Washington Carver, The Black History Monthiest Of Them All

Tuesday, February 11, 2014

Peanuts.

He did something, probably a lot of somethings, with peanuts.

That's basically the response I got when I asked people — my friends, folks on Twitter — what they knew about about George Washington Carver.

The details were hazy, but folks remembered that Carver was really important.

Oh, and ...

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Quarterback Russell Wilson Sets A Milestone, And Everyone Shrugs

Monday, February 03, 2014

It happened again.

Last night during the Super Bowl, Coca-Cola aired an ad that featured snapshots from a multicultural America — a family sitting down for dinner at a restaurant; children on a road trip, pointing at mountains; teenagers tap-dancing on the street; dads roller skating. The scenes were overlaid ...

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That Cute Cheerios Ad With The Interracial Family Is Back

Thursday, January 30, 2014

You might remember that Cheerios ad that caused a big hullabaloo last summer — and boy, is that a weird phrase to write — after it enraged all the knuckle-draggers on the Internet. Were they scandalized by General Mills' claims that Cheerios is good for heart health? Or were ...

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Poll Of U.S. Latinos Offers Snapshot Of Immigrant Vs. Nonimmigrant Experience

Friday, January 24, 2014

Our poll on the life experiences of Latino Americans underscored just how different those experiences can be. But many of the most interesting comparisons among our respondents were between folks who were born here in the United States or Puerto Rico and those who were born elsewhere and came ...

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Superhero Super-Fans Talk Race And Identity In Comics

Saturday, January 11, 2014

The X-Men comic franchise has proven remarkably sturdy in the half-century since its launch. It's spawned dozens of animated series and four major Hollywood films with a fifth due out this summer. Part of that is due to its central premise — a minority of superpowered humans called mutants are ...

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Who Gets To Be A Superhero? Race And Identity In Comics

Saturday, January 11, 2014

The X-Men comic franchise has proven remarkably sturdy in the half-century since its launch. They've spawned dozens of animated series and four major Hollywood films with a fifth due out this summer. A big part of that is due to its central premise — a minority of superpowered humans called ...

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The Ugly, Fascinating History Of The Word 'Racism'

Monday, January 06, 2014

The Oxford English Dictionary's first recorded utterance of the word racism was by a man named Richard Henry Pratt in 1902. Pratt was railing against the evils of racial segregation.

Segregating any class or race of people apart from the rest of the people kills the progress of the ...

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Grantland Asks: Which Pop Culture Phenomenon Won 2013?

Wednesday, January 01, 2014

Friend of the blog Rembert Browne and the folks at Grantland put together their annual year-end, winner-take-all tournament bracket to determine just who won pop culture in 2013. Yeah, it's a jokey project, but Grantland is better than just about anyone at considering our popular culture without moralizing ...

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Journalists — Of Color! — To Watch In 2014

Friday, December 27, 2013

You can set your watch to it: If it's the end of the year, journalists are putting together their obligatory lists. And often when someone decides to cobble together a list of the "35 Blanks Under 35 To Watch For," the list is monochromatic. So it went with Politico's "

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The Best Of Code Switch In 2013

Wednesday, December 25, 2013

Everyone else is doing their year-end lists, and we didn't want to be left out. The Code Switch crew compiled our favorite and best-received coverage from the past year: a novel revisiting of a pivotal year a half century ago; attending homecoming at a historically black college that is now ...

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Is A 'Pathway To Citizenship' The Right Concern?

Thursday, December 19, 2013

Much of the debate over whether and how to overhaul the country's immigration policy has hinged on whether and how to create a pathway to citizenship. But a majority of Latinos now say that's less important for unauthorized immigrants than giving them relief from the threat of deportation.

That finding ...

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A Conversation On Blacks In Tech Aims to Illuminate And Demystify

Friday, December 13, 2013

Since the beginning of December, our colleagues at Tell Me More have been hosting a wide-ranging conversation about blacks in tech fields on #NPRBlacksInTech. The tech sector is growing so fast that there's likely to be more jobs than Americans are able to fill, but black folks remained wildly ...

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Taking A Magnifying Glass To The Brown Faces In Medieval Art

Friday, December 13, 2013

The Tumblr sounds a bit like a college course: People of Color in European Art History.

And its goal is pretty ambitious. The blog's author, Malisha Dewalt, says that her goal is to challenge the common perception that pre-Enlightenment Europe was all white, which she argues is a much ...

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When Buying A Home Is Too Costly And The Rent Is Too Damn High

Tuesday, December 10, 2013

Back in 1995, more than half of all people of color rented their homes — almost twice the proportion of white renters. Then the Clinton administration pushed policies to bolster homeownership rates, and those numbers began a gradual, decade-long decline. The number of people of color renting fell below 50 ...

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Why Isn't Open Source A Gateway For Coders Of Color?

Thursday, December 05, 2013

All this month, our friends at Tell Me More are digging into the role of blacks in technology. You can join the conversation on Twitter with the hashtag #NPRBlacksInTech.

Software development is a huge and growing industry, and there are likely to be far more jobs in the ...

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A Battle For Fair Housing Still Raging, But Mostly Forgotten

Monday, December 02, 2013

It's not something we think about a lot or something that gets reported on often, but once you start digging around some, it's hard not to see the consequences of our country's long, sordid history of housing discrimination everywhere racial disparities manifest. The giant wealth gap between black and Latino ...

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'The Knockout Game': An Old Phenomenon With Fresh Branding

Wednesday, November 27, 2013

There are a few variations, but this is generally how "the knockout game" works: A teenager, or a bunch of teenagers, bored and looking for something to get into, spies some unsuspecting mark on the street. They size up the person, then walk up close to their target and — ...

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When Hollywood Movies Get 'Race-Themed' Into The Same Box

Tuesday, November 19, 2013

The Best Man Holiday, the much-anticipated follow-up to the 1999 romantic comedy The Best Man, made $30 million and nearly nabbed the No. 1 spot at the weekend box office.

That wouldn't have surprised anyone on social media or who heard the peals of delight that greeted the ...

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Dolphins' Story Is About Race And Bullying, But Not The Way You Think

Thursday, November 07, 2013

Over the last few days, the sports media has been transfixed by the story of Jonathan Martin and Richie Incognito, two burly offensive lineman who play for the Miami Dolphins. Martin, a 24-year-old, second-year pro, abruptly walked away from the team last week after an incident with Incognito, 30, his ...

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Five Minutes With First Black Man To Play For The NBA

Saturday, November 02, 2013

Earl Lloyd became the first black man to play in the NBA 63 years ago this week. Lloyd was a forward for the Washington Capitols who grew up in Virginia. He didn't break the league's color barrier (the New York Knicks' Wat Masaka, a Japanese-American point guard, beat him ...

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