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Race

Arthur Mitchell dancing with New York City Ballet, 1963.

Arthur Mitchell obituary

By News & Current Affairs

The first African American principal dancer to star in a major ballet company. By Wendy Perron, The Guardian — A star of New York City Ballet and the co-founder of Dance Theatre of Harlem, Arthur Mitchell was also the first African American principal dancer in any major ballet company. Mitchell, who has died aged 84, had classical lines, buoyant energy and a palpable joy in movement. In NYCB, where he danced from…

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Race is still the central dividing line in the Democratic Party

By Commentaries/Opinions

The recent DNC vote over superdelegates revealed longstanding divisions within the party. By Seth Masket, Vox — What do Democrats fight about when they’re just fighting among themselves? The same thing the country fights about: race. I’m just back from attending the Democratic National Committee’s summer meeting in Chicago, where I observed as the party passed a number of reform measures, including a controversial proposal to reduce the power of…

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Peter Cvjetanovic along with neo-Nazis and white supremacists at the University of Virginia campus in Charlottesville, Virginia on \ in Charlottesville, Va. Photograph: Anadolu Agency/Getty Images

A year after Charlottesville, white nationalist views creep into politics

By News & Current Affairs

The far right movement may seem all but dead, but a crop of political candidates are introducing ideas into the mainstream. Vegas Tenold, The Guardian — No one would argue that the last year hasn’t been a rough one for the white nationalist movement in America. In fact, a not insignificant number of column inches has been written about how the movement is all but dead. The leader of the…

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White threat in a browning America

White threat in a browning America

By Commentaries/Opinions

How demographic change is fracturing our politics. By Ezra Klein, Vox — In 2008, Barack Obama held up change as a beacon, attaching to it another word, a word that channeled everything his young and diverse coalition saw in his rise and their newfound political power: hope. An America that would elect a black man president was an America in which a future was being written that would read thrillingly different…

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White protesters march against racial integration during a rally in Little Rock, Arkansas, on August 20, 1959. (Photo: Library of Congress)

White Supremacy Has Always Been Mainstream

By Editors' Choice

By Stephen Kantrowitz, Boston Review — White supremacy is a language of unease. It does not describe racial domination so much as worry about it. White supremacy connotes many grim and terrifying things, including inequality, exclusion, injustice, and state and vigilante violence. Like whiteness itself, white supremacy arose from the world of Atlantic slavery but survived its demise. Yet while the structures are old, the term “white supremacy” is not.…

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