Our children often have a unique vantage point on the world adults have created. They see the contradictions between what we say and what we do. In the book Bitters in the Honey: Tales of Hope and Disappointment Across Divides of Race and Time, a white student at Central High School in Little Rock, Ark.,…

The Negro was unsexed and made to eat a portion of his anatomy which had been cut away. Another portion was sent by parcel post to Governor Dorsey, whom the people of this section hate bitterly. —lynching of “Negro” Williams, Moultrie, Ga., Washington Eagle, July 16, 1921 Four young women from the crowd pushed their…

When President Obama released his long-form birth certificate in response to the tirades of the lunatic fringe “Birthers,” you could almost hear the groans of blacks all over America. We understood the president’s desire to quell the distraction drummed up by the Birthers, whose thinly veiled appeal to tropes of racial “otherness” had become the…

Troy Davis’ late-night execution in Georgia is a powerful example of a glaring and unavoidable truth: America’s criminal-justice system is broken. Davis’ case became an international cause after years of activism by his family and civil rights groups. It’s now well-known that Davis unsuccessfully sought a new trial after seven of the witnesses who pegged…

“How come I’ve never seen you people before?””Because we are the people you do not see.” This exchange, between a gangster who traffics in human organs and a Nigerian illegal immigrant cab driver in the British film Dirty, Pretty Things, drives home the central theme of Stephen Frears’ 2002 drama about the underground lives of…

While most of the country was riveted by the verdict in the Casey Anthony case — invoking the O.J. trial and decrying what many regarded as an unjust verdict — the Equal Justice Initiative (EJI), a nonprofit criminal-defense and civil rights law and advocacy firm, released yet another in a series of reports that clearly…

Yesterday’s U.S. Supreme Court decision in Wal-Mart v. Dukes (pdf) — the largest employment-discrimination suit ever filed in the United States — reflects precisely the kind of overreach that makes so many of the decisions by the court’s five-member conservative majority sweeping and regressive. It’s not as though experts expected that a majority of the…

It was a bad sign at oral argument in Connick v. Thompson last October that the plight of John Thompson was never mentioned. In his opening remarks, his attorney tried to refer to his client. But the justices weren’t having any of it. Not one of the nine made a specific reference to Thompson, who…