African American Studies

We live in the age of the individual. Every day, we're bombarded with depictions of the beautiful, successful, slim, socially conscious, and extroverted individual that our culture has decided is the perfect self, and we berate ourselves when we don't...

A reckoning with the way we choose to see and define ourselves, Self-Portrait in Black and White is the searching story of one American family's multigenerational transformation from what is called black to what is assumed to be white. Thomas Chatterton...

In these five eloquent and passionate pieces (which she gave as the prestigious Reith Lectures for the BBC) Patricia J. Williams asks how we might achieve a world where color doesn't matter--where whiteness is not equated with normalcy and blackness with...

Opal Singleton is President and CEO of Million Kids and Training and Outreach Coordinator for Riverside County Anti Human Trafficking Task Force. Opal trains thousands of government agencies, school administrators, corporations, civic groups and faith...

Secret societies have operated in Detroit for most of the city's history. Many started for fun and companionship. Others had more serious ends in mind. The African American Mysteries: The Order of the Men of Oppression helped enslaved people escape the...

Secret societies have operated in Detroit for most of the city's history. Many started for fun and companionship. Others had more serious ends in mind. The African American Mysteries: The Order of the Men of Oppression helped enslaved people escape the...

The public and the media are fascinated by U.S. government secrets, real and imagined, yet very few people know how the process of obtaining formerly secret documents works. Secrecy Wars is a look inside the American secrecy system as it is accessed...

Seattle, Washington, the Emerald City is an extraordinarily blessed piece of planet earth. Called the jewel of the northwest, people move here from all over in spite of the rain and overcast days because of the natural beauty, outdoor recreation and job...

The image of a scorpion surrounded by a ring of fire, stinging itself to death, was widespread among antislavery leaders before the Civil War. It captures their long-standing strategy for peaceful abolition: they would surround the slave states with a...

Fatema Mernissi, the world-renowned Islamic feminist, has shed unprecedented light on the lives of women in the Middle East, in works hailed as enchanting (The New York Times Book Review), exuberant (Elle), and remarkable (The Washington Post Book...