Race & Identity

In 1914, in defiance of his middle-class landowning family, a young white man named James Morgan Richardson married a light-skinned black woman named Edna Howell. Over more than twenty years of marriage, they formed a strong family and built a house at the end of a winding sandy road in South Alabama, a place where their safety from the hostile world around them was assured, and where they developed a unique racial and cultural identity. Jim and Edna Richardson were… more

In 1914, in defiance of his middle-class landowning family, a young white man named James Morgan Richardson married a light-skinned black woman named Edna Howell. Over more than twenty years of marriage, they formed a strong family and built a house at the end of a winding sandy road in South Alabama, a place where their safety from the hostile world around them was assured, and where they developed a unique racial and cultural identity. Jim and Edna Richardson were… more

In The House At The End Of The Road, W. Ralph Eubanks tells the story of his white grandfather, James Morgan Richardson, and black grandmother, Edna Howell. Jim and Edna married around 1914, in defiance of his middle-class family.

Writing From New Orleans -- Four years after New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin tried to endear himself to black voters by playing to their fears that they were about to be "overrun by Mexican workers," things have and haven't changed.

Mexican and other Latin American migrants who came to rebuild in the wake of Hurricane Katrina didn't overwhelm the city. But, at roughly 15% of the population -- up from 3% pre-Katrina -- they aren't going away either, and New Orleans… more

In the days between Christmas and New Year's Eve, Anthony Romero, executive director of the American Civil Liberties Union, sat at his desk in Lower Manhattan and reached out to people who had lavished generous donations on his organization during the long, benighted tenure of George W. Bush. It was a heady moment: the era of Dick Cheney, John Ashcroft and Alberto Gonzales was winding to a close, and Barack Obama was about to assume office, having vowed to rescind some of his predecessor's more egregious assaults… more

A recent column in the alumni newsletter of my alma mater, the University of Mississippi, is headlined "We Have Legacies." The quote is lifted from the column and would ordinarily evoke the world of Southern landed gentry. A photograph on the page, however, shows the author to be an African-American woman, thereby turning another Old South stereotype on its head at a school that already has cast off many symbols of its all-white history. The battle flag of the Confederacy is no longer displayed at Ole Miss football… more

If I didn't already prefer Ketel One vodka in my martinis, I might very well call for my own boycott against Absolut.

Not because I agree with the knuckleheads who fear that the Swedish company's advertisement featuring a map of the American Southwest as Mexican territory is fueling ethnic secessionism, but because, in its attempt to lure upper-middle-class consumers in Mexico, the company played on an age-old canard that has historically been used to justify discrimination against Mexican immigrants and… more

Last February, I found myself in the difficult position of explaining American insecurity to a group of Mexican undergraduates at a college in Matamoros, Mexico, just south of the border at Brownsville, Texas. I was taking questions after delivering a lecture on the long-term prospects of Mexican immigrants being accepted into U.S. society. A neatly dressed young man in the back stood up to ask a pointed question. "How," he said politely in Spanish, "could such a rich and powerful… more

Long before so much of the nation became fixated on what was being preached inside black churches on Sunday mornings, Peter Drucker would go on occasion and listen for himself.

It was the late 1930s, and Drucker had just landed in New York, having fled the Nazis. Whenever he happened to spend the weekend in Washington, Drucker recalled years later, he would sneak into Rankin Chapel to be "shaken and moved" by Howard Thurman, the chaplain at Howard University. His was… more