If you’re looking this summer to get a firmer grasp of African-American life and culture, these four intensely dynamic, wide-ranging books, enriched by vital, memorable language and compelling vision, can’t be beat.   Collected Poems by Robert Hayden This is a book I come back to time and again—a seminal work that illuminates African-American life […]

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USAF Photo by SSGT Jacob N. Bailey    On May 16, journalist Michael Isikoff reported that the CIA inspector general’s office, the agency’s internal watchdog, admitted to “mistakenly” destroying its only copy of the Senate Intelligence Committee’s infamous 6,700-page torture report. While another copy is reported to exist elsewhere in the agency, little else is […]

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Trayvon Martin’s father Tracy Martin and mother Sybrina Fulton speak at a protest in New York City. Photo Credit: David Shankbone   When George Zimmerman shot Trayvon Martin, 2.7 million Americans had their eyes on LeBron James. It was the night of the NBA’s 2012 All-Star game. LeBron scored 36 points, with six rebounds and seven assists. […]

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  Mitchell Duneier’s Ghetto: The Invention of a Place, the History of an Idea is not so much a full history of the ghetto as a place as it is an intellectual history of those who have studied it. Duneier profiles four black social scientists and community leaders who engaged with the physical spaces frequently […]

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Photo Credit: USGS   Architectural determinism has a strange effect: under its auspices, behavior is attributed to brick and mortar. Towers sow violence and destitution, either by creating irresistible opportunities for crime or structuring life in such a way that social contracts continually rupture. The argument is at once both a perverse scapegoating and a peculiar […]

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