Category: United States

  • Building a Face, and a Case, on DNA The New York Times 2015-02-23 Andrew Pollack The police in Columbia, S.C.,  released this sketch of a possible suspect based on DNA left at the crime scene. Parabon NanoLabs, which made the image, has begun offering DNA phenotyping services to law enforcement agencies. There were no known…

  • The Kidnapping of Mollie Digby: Was the Fair-Haired Stranger Actually Mollie? All Things Crime 2015-02-20 Darcia Helle In 1870, New Orleans was a city divided by politics, class, and race. The Civil War had left much of the south reeling, and now the government’s Radical Reconstruction attempted to force change by integrating the black population…

  • The white man who pretended to be black The Telegraph 2015-02-05 Tim Stanley With the release of the movie Selma, a lot of Americans are asking how far race relations have really come in the United States. On the one hand, the movie depicts the success of the Sixties civil rights crusade – its victory…

  • In the Deep South of the 1950s, journalist John Howard Griffin decided to cross the color line. Using medication that darkened his skin to deep brown, he exchanged his privileged life as a Southern white man for the disenfranchised world of an unemployed black man.

  • Fresh Off the Boat Is Not Science Fiction David Shih 2015-02-10 David Shih, Associate Professor of English University of Wisconsin, Eau Claire I have always known that moment of disappearance and the even uglier truth is that I have long treasured it. That always honorable-seeming absence. It appears I can go anywhere I wish. Is…

  • The Secret History of South Asian & African American Solidarity NBC News 2015-02-16 Frances Kai-Hwa Wang Most Americans know about Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.’s adoption of Gandhian non-violent principles. Not as well known is the shared solidarity between South Asians and African Americans that dates back over a hundred years. For African American History…

  • An Open Letter to the White Fathers of Black Daughters bluestockings magazine 2015-02-23 Kelsey Henry I have been drafting this letter since I was ten. I am twenty and tonight is the first night I will write these words outside of me. I don’t know what they will look like here. Honestly, I am scared…

  • In 1854, a Cherokee Indian called Yellow Bird (better known as John Rollin Ridge) launched in this book the myth of Joaquín Murieta, based on the California criminal career of a 19th century Mexican bandit. Today this folk hero has been written into state histories, sensationalized in books, poems, and articles throughout America, Spain, France,…

  • Is it still Interracial dating when you’re mixed? Fusion 2015-02-19 Simone Jacobson Washington, D.C. No matter where I live or whom I date, I will always be out of context. Here’s how it all began: My mother and my maternal grandparents were born in Burma. My grandpa’s father was Chinese and my grandma’s father was…

  • Giuliani: Obama Had a White Mother, So I’m Not a Racist The New York Times 2015-02-19 Maggie Haberman, Political Reporter Nicholas Confessore, Political Reporter Former Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani of New York on Thursday defended his assertion that President Obama did not love America, and said that his criticism of Mr. Obama’s upbringing should not…