I used to love Playboy magazine. And yes, it was mainly for the articles. But I wasn’t exactly repulsed by the pictures. You may find that an odd admission for an avowed feminist, but I’ve always felt the argument over the sexual objectification of women tends to miss an important point. Namely, that sexuality is […]

One day in April of 1880, a cadet named Johnson Whittaker was found unconscious in his room at West Point. Whittaker, who was African American, had been gagged and beaten, tied to his bed and slashed on the face and hands. He said three white cadets had assaulted him. West Point investigated. Its official conclusion […]

“This,” says Roni Dean-Burren, “is what erasure looks like.” She’s talking about something you might otherwise have thought innocuous: a page from World Geography, a high school textbook. A few days ago, you see, Dean-Burren, a former teacher and a doctoral candidate at the University of Houston, was texted a caption from that book by […]

And the Bush family’s War on English continues. You are, by now, familiar with the astonishingly tone-deaf response by Jeb Bush, the nation’s would-be 45th president, to last week’s shooting at a community college in Oregon in which a gunman killed nine people. “Look,” said Bush, “stuff happens.” Like a stink bomb in the flower […]

What can I do? Not quite six months ago, a reader named Tracy posed that question to me and I, in turn, posed it to you. Tracy, a 55-year-old white woman from Austin, said she was sick of hearing about unarmed African-American men being injured or killed by police. “What can be done?” she asked. […]

It was the road sign that made it real. Josh Venkataraman was returning to the University of Florida, where he is a senior, from Orlando earlier this year when he saw it. “Groveland,” it said. He had read what happened there in Gilbert King’s Pulitzer Prize-winning book, “Devil in the Grove,” for a class a […]

A quick lesson in political language. In 1958, Democrat George Wallace, running as a candidate for governor of Alabama and racially moderate enough to be endorsed by the NAACP, was swamped by a strident white supremacist whose campaign played shamelessly to the basest hatreds of the electorate. Afterward, Wallace complained bitterly to a room full […]

This is an elegy for John Gibson. He was a married father of two, a pastor and a professor at New Orleans Baptist Theological Seminary. He is said to have loved fixing cars and to have had an oddball laugh. In photos, he and his wife Christi and their two kids come across as a […]