Essay
In the United States, why is wealth—especially financial wealth—held by white households so disproportionately and, in particular, by the most affluent ones? Racial wealth inequality is no accident of history. Rather, it is the intended result of the southern Democrats in Congress who controlled federal tax policy throughout most of the twentieth century. Beginning in »
Essay
Listen: no one can give you rights. You have to take them. Nobody—not your mother, not your partner, not your senator, not Jesus, or me—can tell you how to feel or what to think. I’m supposed to turn the stories we hear on the other end of the line into smoothed over, anonymized anecdotes that »
Essay
On July 4, 1867, Augusta, Georgia’s newspaper, the Daily Constitutionalist, published the words to a new song that seemed to reflect the bitterness felt by many white southerners following the Confederate defeat. The paper printed the song’s title as “O! I’m a Good Old Rebel” above a spiteful dedication to Thaddeus Stevens, the abolitionist congressman »
Essay
In 1966, a retired high school principal named George Thompson Pound reached for his Rand McNally atlas. He turned to page six, took a pen, and drew off Appalachia. Starting in West Virginia, he marked along the Blue Ridge Mountains, through the Carolinas, northwest Georgia, and east Alabama. But Pound kept going. He marked past »
Interview
First things first: Representative Renitta Shannon, who represents Georgia’s 84th district in the state’s legislature, was raised a PK—a preacher’s kid. In her father’s Primitive Baptist church—one so doggedly literal that it frowned upon 11 a.m. Sunday communion because the practice debuted at the Last Supper, that world-changing evening meal—she absorbed and sometimes questioned the »
Essay
In the heat of an Atlanta summer evening, the ALFA Omegas softball team took the field at Iverson Park. As an out-lesbian team organized by the Atlanta Lesbian Feminist Alliance (ALFA), they were different from other softball lineups in the City League in 1974. The Omegas brought together ALFA members at varying skill levels—neophytes and »
Essay
In February 22, 2018, West Virginia public school teachers and school service employees, most of them women, walked out of their classrooms in what would become a nine-day statewide strike, fighting for a 5% raise and affordable healthcare coverage. But what the teachers’ statements, speeches, and protest signs indicated was that this was not just »
Essay
Two weeks ago, President Trump tweeted that a future Democratic president risked impeachment “without due process or fairness or any legal rights. All Republicans must remember what they are witnessing here—a lynching.” Trump’s claims to victimhood are absurd. He is a wealthy white man and President of the United States; lynchings targeted and killed vulnerable »
Essay
Mark Twain hated Sir Walter Scott. He blamed Scott for the Civil War, accusing him of infecting the South with the “Sir Walter disease,” brought on by the “sham grandeurs, sham gauds, and sham chivalries of a brainless and worthless long-vanished society.” Before the war and beyond the South’s defeat into the heyday of the »
Photo Essay
“We have to figure out how we go around [the mountain] or, like Hannibal, how we just run the troops up.” Kiese Laymon: Yo, man. It’s so good to talk to you, fam. I don’t even know how to ask somebody as busy as you how you doing. Are you less busy in the summer, »
Interview
AMY WRIGHT: Do you consider yourself a radical, meaning that you favor drastic political, economic, or social reform? JANISSE RAY: There’s no denying that I am a radical and that I favor far-reaching and extreme reform on many levels. We are at a place globally that requires drastic action. We need immediate action to mitigate »
Interview
VALERIE BOYD: Everybody I’ve talked with, when I’ve told them that I’m interviewing Stacey Abrams, they’re so excited—and especially Black women. Every time I tell a Black woman I’m interviewing you, they get a dreamy look in their eyes that’s usually reserved for Michelle Obama. Well, maybe Oprah. But now there are three Black women »