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Category: American Society

  • Reconciling the Double Helix

    By Sharon Leslie Morgan | As a genealogist, DNA has intrigued me ever since its first promotion as a consumer product in 2003. That was the year Dr. Rick Kittles launched African Ancestry, a company that specializes in uncovering the genetic origins of people of African descent. It marked twenty-eight years into my personal research…

  • The Big Picture of “Teaching the New Way” in the Ron Clark Academy Video

    By Christopher Emdin My phone buzzes one more time. I look over at the glowing screen to see that I have been tagged once more in the Ron Clark dance video from his school in Atlanta. I nod, give a half smile at the screen, and continue on my school visits. Today, I’m in the…

  • Feast of Life: A Tribute to Anthropologist Sidney Mintz

    By Deborah Chasman I’ll never forget meeting Sid Mintz, who passed away last month. I was a young(ish) book editor at Beacon Press, hoping to develop our anthropology list. Why not start at the top? Years earlier, Sid had transformed the fields of both history and anthropology with the publication of Sweetness and Power, which…

  • Boston Globe Workers Protest for Delivery of Labor Rights

    By Aviva Chomsky If you live anywhere near the Boston area, you’ve probably heard or read something about the Boston Globe’s recent delivery debacle. Since the newspaper contracted with a new delivery company starting December 28, the entire delivery system collapsed, and subscribers have been puzzled and furious that their daily newspaper has vanished with…

  • Fourteen Steps Forward Together for America’s Third Reconstruction

    By Rev. Dr. William J. Barber II with Jonathan Wilson-Hartgrove America’s Third Reconstruction depends on a moral movement, deeply rooted in the South, emerging state by state throughout the nation. No single leader or organization can orchestrate such a movement, but we who have seen the power of fusion organizing in North Carolina in 2014…

  • A Skirmish Between Colonizers

    By Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz Two polarized positions mark the ongoing debate in the United States over gun violence, mass killings, and armed citizen militias, such as the militias that seized federal land in Oregon on January 2. These positions rest on the text and interpretation of the Second Amendment of the US Constitution: A well regulated…

  • Binge Eating, Sugar Addiction, and Coming Out of the Pantry

    A Q&A with Lisa Kotin When I was in the food, in the sugar, I had little or no self-love/respect. It was a merry-go-round of bingeing, hitting (another) bottom, cleaning up my act, seeking out a man to try to fill me, feeling bad because the romance didn’t turn out to be what I fantasized…

  • Everyday Is Like Christmas in Rawalpindi

    In an odd way, every day is like Christmas around here in Rawalpindi. The lights we put up once a year in the States are part of my everyday landscape in Pakistan. Red, blue, yellow and green lights are festooned outside the enormous wedding halls that dot the landscape of life here. Weddings are very…

  • Justice Scalia’s Racial Resentment and Affirmative Action

    There he goes again. Last week Justice Antonin Scalia spoke plainly on his misgivings about affirmative action. Afterwards, his commentary was a constant subject at holiday cocktail parties in Washington, DC where I live. Abigail Fisher’s case challenging the University of Texas’ use of affirmative action was back before the Supreme Court for the second…

  • Rosa Parks and the Decisive Arrest

    On December 1, 1955, an attractive Negro seamstress, Mrs. Rosa Parks, boarded the Cleveland Avenue bus in downtown Montgomery. She was returning home after her regular day’s work in the Montgomery Fair, a leading department store. Tired from long hours on her feet, Mrs. Parks sat down in the first seat behind the section reserved…