By Kenneth J. Cooper
Because I was often mistaken for Egyptian, I had my own brushes with police hostility, especially from the plainclothes officers, who seemed to be everywhere.

By Lee A. Daniels
These are dark-skinned people, not … like you and me.”

There you have it. Brief and to the point. The words sound so familiar, so American.

But they weren’t spoken by an American.

By TaRessa Stovall
When Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton apologized on Friday, October 1, to the nation of Guatemala for the United States government’s use of hundreds of their citizens as guinea pigs in the 1940s, millions of Americans—particularly African Americans—had a flash of déjà vu. And few were surprised to learn of common links between the two medical travesties.

By The Editors
They’re a people who’ve endured centuries of enslavement, and even after their emancipation in the nineteenth century, endured decades of discrimination whose effects are visible and felt down to the present day.

In broad outline, those words describe the great part of black Americans’ history. But it also describes the history – and the present – of the Roma, an Indo- European people commonly and often derisively called gypsies.

By TaRessa Stovall
Human rights in the U.S. came under new scrutiny on August 20, when the Obama administration submitted the nation’s first-ever report to the United Nations Human Rights Council.

By George E. Curry
Medical trials now underway in the very region most ravaged by the virus hold the best prospect of finally controlling the disease for which there is no known cure.

By TaRessa Stovall
A trio of new products designed to protect against rape and STDs, especially HIV/AIDS, raises questions about the gaps and conflicts between scientific progress, lifestyle logistics and human nature. These recent developments also call into question the age-old role of Black bodies as test sites for potential progress.

By Tarice L.S. Gray
The Hilde Back Educational Fund is a small organization, with the mission of promoting educational development through sponsorship. The film documents their small yet significant impact in Kenya. But the tiny village in Kenya can be looked at as a microcosm for much of the rest of the world.

By Jelani Cobb
Moscow’s subways are a thing to behold. Designed to be functional museums, the stations have marble floors, massive stained glass panoramas and epic scale sculpture of revolutionary war heroes. But for several hours yesterday those floors were given over to a less noble task as the dead were pulled from the carnage of the south bound red line train and laid out to be counted and removed.

By Jelani Cobb
Moscow is a city of contradictions. Some are obvious: streets where 18th century architecture of the tsarist era nestles against staid Soviet-inspired office buildings, which in turn contrast the post Cold War skyscrapers. Others remain below the surface but are no less complex.