Gene Demby

A Minneapolis nightspot called Bar Louie landed in the news after some local residents took issue with its new dress code.

No flat-billed hats. No long white T-shirts. No large chains. No sleeveless under shirts. No athletic apparel. No sports jerseys without collars. No excessively baggy clothing.

(Either Bar ...

The comedy superstar has been headlining a series of sold-out shows at Radio City Music Hall. His routine was a reminder of a singular perspective on race that vanished when he went on hiatus.

People have been waiting for Latinos to supplant blacks at the top of Upper Manhattan's political structure for some time. They're still waiting.

Back in 2012, Adriano Espaillat, the state senator who represents much of the West Side of Manhattan — including the heavily Dominican neighborhood of Washington Heights — ...

If it seems like we talk about housing a lot on Code Switch, it's because we do. But the fact is it's really hard to talk about all the ways race correlates to different outcomes — in health or education, say— without talking about where people live. Take household wealth, ...

The Y.N. RichKids, that crew of school-age rappers from Minneapolis, just dropped another age-appropriate banger called "The Business." Like their previous songs — they were also back last year with a minor hit called "My Bike" — "The Business" is slickly produced and thoroughly unthreatening. (Sample lyric: Don't worry ...

We've been talking a lot lately about how who fills out the Census in what way. It's an ongoing preoccupation of Code Switch, and one shared by Julie Dowling. Dowling, a University of Illinois sociologist, whose book, Mexican Americans and the Question of Race, came out earlier this ...

Sinead O'Connor's nearly 30-year career forms a portrait of an artist in conflict; a brilliant singer who remains musically, politically and personally uncompromising after forays into folk, pop, standards, reggae and points beyond. By definition, her catalog is erratic, but it's consistently bold and surprising.

On August 12, O'Connor ...

If you were watching the Miami Heat and the San Antonio Spurs face off Game 3 of the NBA Finals last night, you might have caught a surprising political spot during halftime.

The ad was released online just before the Super Bowl in late January, but last night's prime time ...

Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel testified before the House Armed Services Committee on Wednesday, defending the prisoner swap that freed Army Sgt. Bowe Bergdahl.

This post has been updated.

We tend to think of a race as a static thing, but it's always been much more slippery. American history has seen lots of immigrant groups that were the targets of suspicion and even racial violence — Jews, the Irish, Germans, Italians — gradually ...

EDITOR'S NOTE: This summer, we'll be regularly spotlighting sites on the National Register of Historic Places that have some significance to issues of race and culture.

The Montgomery Greyhound Station, Montgomery, Ala.

It seems odd to suggest that folks should visit a bus station if they're in the area; ...

The Tewaaraton Award is college lacrosse's equivalent of the Heisman Trophy, given to the best player in the country each year. The award takes its name from the Mohawk word for lacrosse, as a way to honor the sport's Native American origins. The bronze trophy depicts a Mohawk man with ...

The Tewaaraton Award is college lacrosse's equivalent of the Heisman Trophy, given out each year to the sport's best male and female players.

This year, Miles and Lyle Thompson, brothers from the Onondaga Nation who are teammates at the University at Albany, State University of New York, are ...

The title of Ta-Nehisi Coates' much-discussed cover story at The Atlantic, "The Case for Reparations," might be something of a misnomer.

Coates' opus is really calling for a collective reckoning with America's history, and he uses a call for reparations as the vehicle. He aims to disabuse readers of ...

The Atlantic does this a lot: use the magazine's covers to launch large, provocative conversations that you later hear endlessly dissected on cable news, in the blogosphere, and on Twitter. It is a think piece factory. You might recall Hanna Rosin's declaration that we'd reached "The End of Men," ...

Post Updated 1:45 a.m. ET Tuesday:

Macklemore posted an apology on his website late Monday. He said he picked out items that he could use to disguise himself so he could move freely around an event. "I wasn't attempting to mimic any culture, nor resemble one. A 'Jewish stereotype' ...

When New York Times publisher Arthur Sulzberger removed Jill Abramson from the paper's executive editor spot on Wednesday, it stunned the media world. Abramson was the first woman to ever fill the paper's top post and was credited with helping right its fiscal ship, and much of the early ...

One oft-employed generalization about The Kids These Days is that they've grown up free from the legalized discrimination and racial neuroses of older generations, and they will live in a more multicultural world with less racism. But do we even know if that's true?

MTV, that reliable weather vane of ...

Last week, I was having a conversation with a woman who said that her father was distrustful of people of other races. When I asked her if she considered her father a racist, she balked at the premise of the question. When I think of a racist, I think of ...

When I was growing up, my aunt used to stack dozens of magazines high on a side table at the top of her stairs. It was an accidental library of black magazines — lots of Ebony and Essence, the stray Black Enterprise here and there, but especially the digest-sized Jet. ...