Gene Demby

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 ...

As our colleagues at The Two-Way reported, Tawana Brawley, the central figure in one of the most bizarre and racially polarizing cases in New York City's recent history, has begun to pay part of the more than $430,000 judgment against her.

Brawley accused a group of men of having ...

Hip-hop beefs don't burn any slower or get any more bizarre.

Last year, Harry Belafonte, the acclaimed singer, actor and civil rights activist, was awkwardly quoted by a foreign reporter in a Q&A about modern celebrity and social responsibility. The always-outspoken Belafonte didn't really hold back.

Q: Are ...

Last week, a group of young people who'd been deported to Mexico made a big show of their ultimately futile attempt to re-enter the United States. They were pushing for legislation nicknamed the DREAM Act, which would grant a pathway to citizenship for undocumented young people who were brought to ...

Phillip Agnew was blindsided by the verdict in the George Zimmerman trial. The decision came down late on a Saturday night. Agnew was expecting the neighborhood watchman who killed Trayvon Martin to be found guilty.

Agnew, 28, leads a group of young activists called the Dream Defenders, which formed in ...

President Obama's surprise remarks Friday afternoon about the Trayvon Martin case, racial profiling and race more broadly was almost certainly his most extensive remarks about the role race plays in American life — and the role it has played in his own — since his presidency began.

For Obama, discussing ...

A few weeks ago, Levar Burton, the actor best-known for his role as Geordi LaForge in Star Trek and the host of the long-running kids' show Reading Rainbow, appeared on a CNN roundtable and offered up a sobering how-to on driving while black:

Listen, I'm going to be ...

One gray spring afternoon last year, thousands of people descended on Manhattan's Union Square for a rally to call for the arrest of George Zimmerman, the man who shot and killed Trayvon Martin. It had been several weeks since Martin, an unarmed black 17-year-old, was killed by Zimmerman, then 28, ...

As you might have gathered from our blog's title, the Code Switch team is kind of obsessed with the ways we speak to each other. Every Monday in "Word Watch," we'll dig into language that tells us something about the way race is lived in America today. (Interested in contributing? ...