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Articles on US race relations

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Voting rights activists protest voter restriction laws being passed in states across the country, in Washington, D.C., July 15, 2021. Alex Wong/Getty Images

The first battle in the culture wars: The quality of diversity

Americans tend to think of diversity in demographic terms, but it has a qualitative element to it that reflects a fundamental battle between segregation and integration.
Black heavyweight champion Jack Johnson, right, beat James Jeffries in 1910, sparking racial violence. George Haley, San Francisco Call, via University of California, Riverside, via Library of Congress

When a Black boxing champion beat the ‘Great White Hope,’ all hell broke loose

Johnson’s victory, in the manliest of sports, contradicted claims of racial supremacy by whites and demonstrated that Blacks were no longer willing to acquiesce to white dominance.
Pfc Elias Friedensohn in June 1945 at the Special Services Distributing Point, Seine Section, Paris, France. National Archives

The American GI in WWII, uncensored

An unprecedented survey of US GIs that began in 1941, preserved on microfilm, provides a raw and uncensored story of average Americans grappling with both national ideals and practical necessities.
In this October 1998 photo, Nelson Mandela and Desmond Tutu dance after Tutu handed over the final report of South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission in Pretoria. (AP Photo/Zoe Selsky)

Do truth and reconciliation commissions heal divided nations?

Wherever there is an ugly, unresolved injustice pulling at the fabric of a society, there is an opportunity to haul it out in public and deal with it through a truth commission.

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