Feature – Why America’s Black Mothers and Babies Are in a Life-or-Death Crisis. Black infants in America are now more than twice as likely to die as white infants — 11.3 per 1,000 black babies, compared with 4.9 per 1,000 white babies, according to the most recent government data — a racial disparity that is actually wider than in 1850, 15 years before the end of slavery, when most black women were considered chattel. This tragedy of black infant mortality is intimately intertwined with another tragedy: a crisis of death and near death in black mothers themselves. Read more 

America once fought a war against poverty – now it wages a war on the poor. After the 1968 Poor People’s Campaign declared silence was betrayal, we are coming together to stand up to the public policy violence that is ravaging our society. The Rev William Barber and the Rev Liz Theoharis, co-chairs of the Poor People’s Campaign, speak at the National Civil Rights museum on 3 April. Read more 
Democrats can win by tackling race and class together. Here’s proof. The party is often asked to choose between courting white working-class voters and fighting racism but our research shows it can do both. Read more 

The Fight for $15 takes on the ‘Jim Crow economy.’ Birmingham’s fight over the minimum wage, advocates say, echoes the city’s epic civil rights campaign, memorialized in statues like this one.
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My Epiphany About the Problem With Apu. Apu has been a Simpsons fixture from the start, and is far and away the most famous Indian-American character in popular culture. Like many of the show’s characters, he’s a broad stereotype, a miserly convenience store owner who speaks with a pronounced accent. Read more 

No, the BBC is not ‘blackwashing’ Troy: Fall of a City. Why has the casting of David Gyasi and Hakeem Kae-Kazim as Achilles and Zeus proved so controversial? Our best estimate is that the Greeks would be a spectrum of hair colours and skin types in antiquity. I don’t think there’s any reason to doubt they were Mediterranean in skin type (lighter than some and darker than other Europeans), with a fair amount of inter-mixing,” says Whitmarsh. Read more 
Trump Wants America to Revert to the Queens of His Childhood. During President Trump’s formative years, Queens — the New York City “outer borough” in which he grew up — was transformed from an all-white enclave into a racial and ethnic battleground. The forces unleashed in those struggles shaped Trump’s current policies on both immigration and racial integration. Read more 
Can White Supremacists Unlearn Hate? An interview with Michael Kimmel, whose book,”Healing From Hate,” focuses on men who have left their extremist pasts behind. Read more  

A New Look at the New Deal’s Legacy of Public Housing. A review of “High-Risers: Cabrini-Green and the Fate of American Public Housing,” by Ben Austen. Read more   

How Nina Simone Captivated a New Generation. From a high-profile documentary to Jay-Z’s ‘4:44,’ the 2018 Rock and Roll Hall of Fame inductee is in the midst of a major cultural renaissance. Read more 

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