Gene Demby

Judge Shira Scheindlin has earned a reputation as an outspoken defender of civil liberties and a recurring foil for the New York City police. In her ruling in the closely watched stop-and-frisk case, Scheindlin criticized the police, and said the department discriminated against blacks and Latinos. She also said ...

Not long ago, we wrote about The Talk, the conversation that many young men of color get from their parents about how to manage being seen as suspicious and navigate fraught encounters with police officers. It's why Nicholas Peart's story resonated with us. Peart, who lives in Harlem, was ...

We've decided to take a weekly look at a word or phrase that's caught our attention, whether for its history, usage, etymology or just because it has an interesting story.

NOTE TO READERS: This is a post about one of the harshest racial slurs in American English. In the ...

Let's coin a new stereotype right here: Latinos are mad friendly.

Ninety percent of Latinos said that they are friends with people of a different race, according to new poll from Reuters and Ipsos, making them much more likely than the rest of America to reach across racial lines ...

As our colleagues at The Two-Way reported, Tawana Brawley, the central figure in one of the most bizarre and racially polarizing cases in New York City's recent history, has begun to pay part of the more than $430,000 judgment against her.

Brawley accused a group of men of having ...

Hip-hop beefs don't burn any slower or get any more bizarre.

Last year, Harry Belafonte, the acclaimed singer, actor and civil rights activist, was awkwardly quoted by a foreign reporter in a Q&A about modern celebrity and social responsibility. The always-outspoken Belafonte didn't really hold back.

Q: Are ...

Last week, a group of young people who'd been deported to Mexico made a big show of their ultimately futile attempt to re-enter the United States. They were pushing for legislation nicknamed the DREAM Act, which would grant a pathway to citizenship for undocumented young people who were brought to ...

Phillip Agnew was blindsided by the verdict in the George Zimmerman trial. The decision came down late on a Saturday night. Agnew was expecting the neighborhood watchman who killed Trayvon Martin to be found guilty.

Agnew, 28, leads a group of young activists called the Dream Defenders, which formed in ...

President Obama's surprise remarks Friday afternoon about the Trayvon Martin case, racial profiling and race more broadly was almost certainly his most extensive remarks about the role race plays in American life — and the role it has played in his own — since his presidency began.

For Obama, discussing ...

A few weeks ago, Levar Burton, the actor best-known for his role as Geordi LaForge in Star Trek and the host of the long-running kids' show Reading Rainbow, appeared on a CNN roundtable and offered up a sobering how-to on driving while black:

Listen, I'm going to be ...

One gray spring afternoon last year, thousands of people descended on Manhattan's Union Square for a rally to call for the arrest of George Zimmerman, the man who shot and killed Trayvon Martin. It had been several weeks since Martin, an unarmed black 17-year-old, was killed by Zimmerman, then 28, ...

As you might have gathered from our blog's title, the Code Switch team is kind of obsessed with the ways we speak to each other. Every Monday in "Word Watch," we'll dig into language that tells us something about the way race is lived in America today. (Interested in contributing? ...

Earlier this month, St. Paul's College, a tiny, 125-year old liberal arts college in southern Virginia, quietly announced that it was throwing in the towel and would be closing its doors at the end of June.

The 600-student college had been struggling for years to find funding and to remain ...

What up, bro? What's good, brah?

This is the chant of the bro, an equally parodied and celebrated genus of young men. (They've been designated "bros" mostly because, well, they say "bro" a whole lot.)

The usage of "bro" as a term of endearment isn't new, obviously. (As the indispensable ...

LeBron James is Superman to Michael Jordan's Lex Luthor.

That's going to sound blasphemous, but more than the San Antonio Spurs, whom he faces for all of the marbles in tonight's NBA finals, or any other team he might face in the future, James' biggest foil is actually Michael Jordan, ...

We've written before about the wealth gap between whites and people of color — a divide that's only grown wider over the past half decade. And since so much of Americans' household wealth is wrapped up in homes, a significant amount of that wealth gap has been chalked up ...

A Mind Is a Terrible Thing to Waste — you know the phrase, you've heard it.

That's because the iconic slogan, dreamt up by the advertising agency Young & Rubicam goes back more than four decades. It was meant to promote the United Negro College Fund scholarship program for black ...

On Tuesday, Vermont moved to decriminalize the possession of marijuana for quantities up to an ounce, replacing potential prison time for arrests with fines.

Peter Shumlin, the state's governor, made a telling distinction between weed and "harder" drugs when he announced the move. "This legislation allows our courts and ...

We recently found that single black men were much more likely to say they were looking for a long-term relationship (43 percent) compared to single black women (25 percent).

Those numbers come from our big poll of African-Americans' views of their lives and communities (the poll was conducted by ...