If you hear the dogs, keep running. That’s what Hillary Clinton told us Tuesday evening, invoking Harriet Tubman shepherding runaway slaves through the dark night toward freedom. It was an inspiring refrain, especially given the fact that, to many, it is still controversial to suggest that the U.S. government should apologize for the barbarity from…

There are moments in Trouble the Water, the searing new documentary on Hurricane Katrina, particularly in the hours before the hurricane lands, when you think the central character, Kimberly Rivers Roberts, just doesn’t get it. She’s got her video camera trained on her Ninth Ward block, playfully interrogating everybody about what they’re gonna do when…

The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention told us last weekend that America’s AIDS epidemic is 40 percent larger than it had believed, and that black America accounts for about 45 percent of new infections each year. If we’re only 13 percent of the population, how can that be? There’s no one simple answer.…

America likes to consider itself exceptional, a nation blessed with unshakeable good fortune and driven by unyielding ambition. I think that sentiment explains why we so often get caught with our pants down. Our self-absorbed exceptionalism breeds a lazy arrogance that consistently confuses just getting started with finishing the job: Iraq. Al Qaeda. Katrina. It’s…

The grisly details of Baron Pikes’ violent death are remarkable. There’s the fact that Officer Scott Nugent jammed his Taser into the unarmed 21-year-old nine times in 14 minutes. There’s the fact that Pikes was handcuffed during each of those 50,000-volt shocks. And there’s the fact that witnesses heard Pikes, who was supposedly resisting arrest,…

Ida B. Wells, at the turn of the 20th century, called it a “threadbare lie.” She was talking about how lynch mobs masquerading as law enforcement justified their actions by claiming black men were raping white women. But Wells was on to a larger delusion, one that not only inspired sexual hysteria 100 years ago,…

Here’s the wonderful thing about Mos Def’s new film, Be Kind Rewind: I can’t remember a single triumphant moment—and there are several—when one character drives the scene. Solos are left for the emotional valleys; the peaks come in ensemble. That’s the film’s organizing idea, that collectivity fosters not just strength, but joy. It’s an awfully…

Change is in the air, and I’m not talking about presidential politics. While the rest of the country obsesses over delegate math, black America would do well to pay closer attention to another vote count—how senators and members of Congress are lining up on the most serious effort to date to fix our unfair and…

As the nation pours over the dirty details of yet another political sex scandal, federal health officials this week quietly made some sex news that matters. A study discovered that more than one in four teenage girls has a sexually transmitted infection. And sadly, researchers found blacks once again hardest hit by a health problem:…