This essay appears in print in Imagining Global Futures. I grew up on the short story “Toba Tek Singh,” an Urdu satire on the Partition. While the story’s protagonist is a Sikh man, for whom the story ...

U.S. history is a strange, exceptional field of play where, to paraphrase Garrison Keillor’s famous sign-off from Lake Wobegon, all the revolutions are strong, all the revolutionaries are kind, and ...

The United States has never been “a nation of immigrants.” It has always been a settler state with a core of descendants from the original colonial settlers, that is, primarily Anglo-Saxons, Scots, ...

This essay is featured in our Spring 2025 issue. Subscribe to get a copy. Around sunset on March 25, Fatema Ahmad, executive director of the grassroots Muslim Justice League in Boston, was winding ...

This essay appears in our print issue, On Solidarity. As I watched Pat Buchanan address the Republican National Convention three decades ago, I cried. I can still see his doughy face and fixed ...

When James Baldwin visited San Francisco in 1963 to film a documentary about U.S. racism, he encountered neighborhoods in turmoil: the city was seizing properties through eminent domain, razing them, ...

In 2015 a movement for decolonization among student activists and academics in the West gained momentum following protests in South Africa to remove the statue of notorious colonizer Cecil Rhodes at ...

My grandmother was a good Catholic who didn’t go to college and had eight children. Her oldest child went to college and had one child, me. Your own family probably fits this pattern. In a decline ...

At the State University of New York at Stony Brook, the syllabus for an Africana Studies summer course entitled The Politics of Race includes prompts for students in need of term paper guidance. The ...

In Chu T’ien-wen’s 1994 novel Notes of a Desolate Man, the narrator recalls the death a decade earlier of French philosopher Michel Foucault: The unfinished history of sexual consciousness stopped ...

This essay appears in print in Is Equal Opportunity Enough?. In June 2020 Donald Trump tweeted, in characteristically hyperbolic style, that his administration had “done more for the Black Community ...

In 1980 Frances Gabe applied for a patent for a self-cleaning house. The design was based on her own home, which she had worked on for more than a decade. Each room had a sprinkler system installed; ...