Gene Demby

On our inaugural episode, we're digging into how we talk about whiteness — or, really, how we don't talk about it — and hear from some folks who say it's really important that we figure out how.

When we don't acknowledge the role whiteness plays in how Americans vote, we're essentially agreeing to misidentify some of the most important dynamics of this election cycle.

Beyoncé did a thing over the weekend, which means there are a million thinkpieces on the Internet today — on blackness and feminism and celebrity — for you to wade through. But start here.

A longtime Chicago reporter, a native of the black South Side, digs into the ways segregation continues to shape the politics of her hometown, as well as her own life.

With a pair of provocative pieces about white working-class Trump supporters, the National Review has essentially redrawn a line in the sand.

The hit animated Disney movie is an ambitious look at racial profiling and policing. It's also evidence that these issues don't neatly lend themselves to pop culture.

On Friday night, I finally got to see Hamilton, the critically acclaimed musical I've been surprisingly obsessed with since Frannie Kelley's glowing write-up of the cast album last fall.

I say "surprising" because I am not a fan of musical theater, the kind of not-a-fan-of-musical-theater who pointedly self-describes ...

It's been only a year and a half since the social protest movement around police violence commonly referred to as Black Lives Matter emerged as a major political force.

Much of this movement's momentum-building and organizing happened on Twitter, and a fascinating new study by media scholars Charlton McIlwain, ...

You may have read something like this over the past few weeks, in the run-up to this year's hotly contested Academy Awards ceremony:

"The fact that there is an absence of African-American nominees at the awards this year is something I'm less concerned about than how that reflects on ...

So. Macklemore. I suppose we have to talk about Macklemore.

By now you've heard — or heard about — the white Seattle rapper's nine-minute song "White Privilege II," about his tricky relationship with hip-hop and black protest movements. It's typical Macklemore — earnest, more than a little hamfisted — and ...

Over at The Atlantic, Angelica Jade Bastîen has a smart essay pushing back on the supposed benefits of "colorblind casting" in Hollywood — that is, putting actors of color in roles that weren't explicitly written as people of color.

She points to Oscar Isaac, the prolific, charismatic actor who ...

When NPR's Steve Inskeep sat down with President Obama for his year end interview, the president said he is optimistic about where the country is heading. We explore the topic further.

NPR's Ari Shapiro talks to Gene Demby of NPR's Code Switch team about his recent article, "The Long, Necessary History of 'Whiny' Black Protesters At College."

A few weeks ago, I was chatting with a young black woman who recently graduated from Louisiana State. I asked her how she liked it there. She smiled, then sighed in exasperation. Without prompting, she brought up race. She had enrolled at LSU knowing Louisiana is one of the blackest ...

This summer, football players at Northwestern University came very close to successfully forming a union — not to demand that they be paid, but to demand better scholarships and safety protocols. Had their bid succeeded, it might have changed college athletics — and, indeed, higher education — in some ...

In 1890, a shoemaker from Louisiana named Homer Plessy indentified himself as "black" on the decennial U.S. Census population survey. Plessy did this even though, as a Creole who was one-eighth black, he was light-skinned enough to pass for white.

A few years later, the fair-skinned Plessy climbed onto a ...

Over at the New York Times Magazine, ambivalence toward capital "D" diversity courses through Anna Holmes' excellent essay "Has 'Diversity' Lost Its Meaning?" Holmes, the founding editor of Jezebel and now an executive at Fusion, notes that while corporate odes to "diversity" are de rigeur these days ...

Over at the New York Times, Jack Hitt considers the ubiquity of one particular icon of the post-Confederate South. "In front of nearly every courthouse or at the main intersection of nearly every town in the South, you will find a Confederate memorial," Hitt writes. "From the late 19th ...

So far, this season of Empire has been all about whether Lucius Lyon, the diabolical record executive played by Terrence Howard, is going to be convicted of a murder he committed in the show's first season. Last week, the rest of the Lyon family staged a big outdoor rally/concert to ...

Back in the heyday of Jet magazine, that weekly digest of short, fizzy articles about black life, there was a back-page feature simply called "Television." It was a no-frills rundown of nearly every black person who would be appearing on prime-time TV over the coming week, just their names, ...