By Tarice L.S. Gray
The evolution of multiculturalism has not just been about acceptance, but about leveling the playing field.

By Kasha Dragon
The track and field world championships are over. The athletes, medals in hand or not, have packed up and left the heretofore little-known South Korean city of Daegu and scattered to their homes all over the globe.
Most of the world has moved on.
But in Grenada, one of the world’s smallest island nations and in one of its smallest communities, the fishing village of Gouyave, on its west coast, there’re still celebrating the less-than-45 seconds it took to put them on the map of the track and field universe.

By George E. Curry
England’s attempt to fully understand rioting touched off by a policeman’s fatal shooting of Mark Duggan, a 29-year-old black man, in many ways mirror the debate that followed the urban unrest that the United Statesunderwent in the wake of Dr. Martin Luther King’s assassination in 1968.

By Kenneth J. Cooper
Enmeshed in a tangled, longstanding dispute over their citizenship rights, descendants of the Cherokee Freedmen, the former slaves of the Oklahoma-based Native American tribe, are pinning their hopes of healing a public rupture with the Cherokee Nation on a new election for chief.

By Tarice L.S. Gray
Black people in America have had a long-standing love affair with the arts.  When black people in this country were enslaved, laws restricted them from doing much of anything, but they could always sing. Music proved to be more than a lifeline.  Portia Maultsby, Laura Boulten Professor of Folklore and Ethnomusicology at Indiana University, believes that blacks have always used music “as a centerpiece of [their] social and cultural practices.”  It was and remains a way to affirm their African-American identity and be a spiritual bulwark against oppression.

By Lee A. Daniels
Mark Twain would be pleased, wouldn’t he?

The heated reaction to the publishing of a new edition of The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn with the word “nigger” changed to “slave” continues unabated in the mainstream media and the blogosphere.

By Lee A. Daniels
Two high profile events of this week underscore the wisdom of the warning the great historian Barbara W. Tuchman gave in 1982 to those who would “practice” the craft of writing history.

“Leaving things out because they do not fit,” she wrote in her book, Practicing History: Selected Essays, “is writing fiction, not history.”

By Lee A. Daniels
They’ve discovered – again – that baseball really is just like America.
That’s the meaning I took from Thursday’s New York Times story pointing out glaring racial disparity in the game between the positions of first-base and third-base coach. At the first-base position, twenty of the thirty coaches are of African-American, Latino-American or Asian descent. Of the thirty third-base coaches, twenty-three are white, three are black and four are Latino.

By Tarice L.S. Gray
While at a swim meet two weeks ago in Canada, World Record Holder and 2008 US Olympic Swimmer Cullen Jones got some heartbreaking news: Another child of color had drowned in his United States.

By Mark Lassiter
If you are stubbornly resisting the temptation to watch, or thinking about attending a viewing party with a group of total strangers who are living and dying with every goal, here are eleven tips from someone who dares you to hold your breath and say the word “goal!!!” for as long as you can hold it.