He came onstage dropping rose petals and left it dropping tears. The artist yasiin bey (yes, all lowercase), formerly known as Mos Def, spent two evenings in December at the world-famous Apollo Theater in Harlem saying goodbye. After his final U.S. performances (he has three upcoming dates at the Kennedy Center in…

Imagine a show so popular that when it’s on, even movie theaters stop films midreel and broadcast it so that audiences won’t stay home. For decades in the first half of the 20th century, that is exactly what The Amos ’n Andy Show was.

The Great Recession is over. The economy is back on its feet. That’s the popular narrative Americans see and hear every day, but the impact of the financial crisis is still being felt across the country, especially by women of color. A new report (pdf) highlights how “pinklining,” a term most people have probably…

What begins for hundreds of thousands of Americans as a dull pain in a leg can turn into a life-threatening episode that all too often baffles even their doctors. A blood clot that starts in an extremity may be small, but if it breaks off and travels to your lungs or heart, it can kill you in hours or even minutes. On…

In this day and age, there is little reward in seeking the truth, and less profit in sharing that truth once you have found it. So it’s remarkable that a program like Jazz and Spirit could ever come together, much less on a world-renowned stage like Harlem’s Apollo Theater. On Saturday a great philosopher in Cornel…

“Some white Americans are too scared to be openly bigoted, so they call it conservatism.”

Who am I? It seems like a simple enough question, but it is one that thousands of Germans of African descent have to ask themselves every day. In a country that defines identity with a great deal of precision, those who fall outside the norm find themselves trapped in a kind of limbo, neither here nor there.