Race

Scholars explain what affirmative action is — and isn’t — as well as what its effects are, and why, among others, the military has supported it for decades.

At least 1,500 Black Americans have moved to Ghana since 2019, when the government declared its "Year of Return" initiative, calling on Africans in the diaspora to return to Africa. As the US continues to confront its history of racism and police brutality against Black people, many are heeding Ghana's call.  

The Brazilian town of Santa Bárbara d’Oeste is known for one thing above all — its annual Confederate festival. Descendants of thousands of people who emigrated to Brazil from the US South after they lost the Civil War celebrate their American heritage. Typically, the Confederate flag stands out. But recently, the City Council voted to ban the flag because of its racist symbolism.

The song “PAF.no,” one of the biggest hits in Norway this year, features a chorus in Arabic that has everyone singing along — and also discussing what it means to be Norwegian. 

Crystal Kwok is the director of "Blurring the Color Line," a new documentary about her family’s experience in Augusta, Georgia, and the relationships between Chinese Americans and Black people during the Jim Crow era.

Through glittering costumes, provocative floats and bold song lyrics, several samba schools at this year’s Carnival — the first since the pandemic hit — are paying tribute to the country’s Black history while also lambasting the racism and violence that Black Brazilians continue to face. 

Caste was outlawed decades ago across South Asia. But it still exists and has found its way to American campuses.

If climate change continues on its current trajectory, over 200 million climate refugees could be displaced worldwide by the year 2050.

Kimberly St. Julian-Varnon, a historian and a doctoral candidate at the University of Pennsylvania, has been following Griner's case closely. She joined The World's Marco Werman to discuss the risks that Griner now faces in Russian detention.

This week in Critical State, a foreign policy newsletter by Inkstick Media, Sam Ratner takes a deep dive into the history of Freedom House, a Pittsburgh-based Black-led nonprofit hired in 1968 to offer ambulance services in some of the predominantly Black neighborhoods around the city.