It’s “the nuclear bomb of racial epithets,” a word that whites have employed to wound and degrade African Americans for three centuries. Paradoxically, among many black people it has become a term of affection and even empowerment. The word, of cour
In this incisive and unflinching study, Randall Kennedy, author of Nigger: The Strange Career of a Troublesome Word, tackles another stigma of America's racial discourse: “selling out.” He explains the origins of the concept and shows how fear of this
A compilation of some of The Atlantic’s most important writings on race and society over the past century and a half, featuring W. E. B. Du Bois, Frederick Douglass, Booker T. Washington, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Nikole Hannah-Jones, Ta-Nehisi Coates, and m
