By Makani Themba Nixon
A recent Cornell University study finds that half of all US children and 90 percent of black children will eat food paid for by food stamps at some point in their childhoods. You, like the good folk at Cornell, may think this is dire and even shocking news. And for good reason, as the co-authors of the study write in the Archives of Pediatrics and Adolescent Medicine that food stamp use is an important indicator of poverty and food insecurity.

By The Editors
Tom Perez, President Obama’s choice as Assistant Attorney General for the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division — the Administration’s point man on civil rights enforcement—formally took office November 13, amid a palpable sense of celebration among civil rights advocates.

By Lee A. Daniels
The Obama Presidency is less than a year old, but by now many of us are accustomed to the perverse, racist notions that have oozed from the moldering, pathological psyches of some Americans since the majority of voters elected Barack Obama president. Nonetheless, as in the days of blacks’ struggle for basic civil rights, something new always occurs to remind us of racism’s ugly imaginative resiliency.

By Eisa Nefertari Ulen
Rock and Roll is falsely thought of as white music—and not just by white people. Black folk have tended to identify Rock and Roll with the other side of the color line, leaving Black Rock in a ridiculously marginal place.

By James McBride
This is my nightmare: My daughter comes home with a guy and says, “Dad we’re getting married.”

And he’s a rapper, with a mouthful of gold teeth, a do-rag on his head, muscles popping out his arms, and a thug attitude. And then the nightmare gets deeper.

By Mark Lassiter
One summer evening in 1991, I pulled into a gas station at the corner of Ponce De Leon and Piedmont Avenue, in Atlanta. A man, about 5’10”, in a midnight blue three-piece suit, with a pair of blue plastic wrap around sunglasses and a blue silk scarf was paying his bill with cash. What does one say to James Brown?

This week marks the twelfth anniversary of the day Ben Salazar was pardoned in Texas. Salazar spent over five years of a 30-year sentence in prison for a rape he did not commit before DNA testing proved his innocence.

By C. Nicole Mason
The mayoral race in New York City could have been a classic David and Goliath story: Billionaire incumbent spends 100 million only to be defeated by small time politico with few dollars and even fewer big city connections. This unlikely story might have been the case if blacks and Latinos had turned out in larger numbers on Election Day.

By Amy Alexander
In 2003, Kamala Harris became the first African-American woman to be elected District Attorney in San Francisco. Re-elected in 2007, Harris continued the innovative law enforcement work she’d begun while serving as managing attorney in the Career Criminal Unit in the SF DA’s office.

Anthony Robinson was exonerated nine years ago this week in Texas. He served 10 years in prison before he was released on parole in 1997. He then raised funds to pay for his own DNA testing, which would prove him innocent and clear his name in 2000. Today,  he works as a successful attorney, practicing in Texas and China.