Gene Demby

When Michelle Obama squared off with a heckler at a private fundraiser last night, the racial context was hard to ignore: a white woman yelling at the country's most visible black woman and that same black woman offering a pointed response.

The first lady has been enormously popular throughout ...

You might think African-Americans might be more pessimistic about their lives. The housing crisis decimated pockets of black wealth. The black unemployment rate has been nearly double the national average for several years.

But according to findings from our survey of more than 1,000 African-Americans, you'd be wrong.

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When Arvind Mahankali won the Scripps-Howard National Spelling Bee last night, he became the sixth consecutive Indian-American winner and the 11th in the past 15 years.

Back in 1985, Balu Natarajan became the spelling bee's first Indian-American winner. (He won with "milieu" and acknowledged that the words have gotten ...

Sports-talk radio was abuzz Wednesday morning with some comments that Sergio Garcia, the professional golfer, made about his frequent foil, Tiger Woods.

"We'll have him 'round every night," Garcia said. "We will serve fried chicken."

The comment came after Garcia was asked if he would invite his rival, with whom ...

A federal court is set to decide on the lawfulness of stop-and-frisk, New York City's controversial policing strategy meant to stop gun violence. The policy gives police officers wide discretion to stop, question, and in some cases, pat down people they suspect are carrying illegal guns.

But the numbers ...

When President Obama stepped to the lectern on Sunday to address Morehouse College's graduating class, he gave exactly the kind of speech that you give at Morehouse. The president told the graduating students that they had been trained and nurtured to be leaders. He linked their personal and professional successes ...

OK, let's get this out of the way: Scandal is a ridiculous show.

The hit ABC drama about a Washington "fixer" named Olivia Pope just wrapped up its second season with one of its trademark cliffhangers.

(Assume spoilers, y'all.)

Scandal's plot arcs aren't really arcs so much as straight vertical ...

Never heard of the British singer-songwriter Laura Mvula? Oliver Wang over at All Things Considered suggests that you should fix that. And soon.

"It's not exactly pop or soul or jazz — it's all those things, but it transcends those things," Wang wrote.

And Wang isn't alone. Mvula's album ...

It's an old story: The straightest and surest path to becoming a big-time comedy star is by becoming a cast member or writer on Saturday Night Live. That was proved true again this week when Seth Meyers, SNL's head writer, was tapped to be the new host of NBC's Late ...

Early on Sunday morning, 40 or so members of the Original Big Seven Social Aid and Pleasure Club began their annual Mother's Day parade. The Original Big Seven, originally formed in a housing project that was torn down after Hurricane Katrina, is one of the city's big second-line groups. Second-lines ...

When Cleveland officials announced charges against Ariel Castro — the suspected kidnapper of Amanda Berry, Gina DeJesus and Michelle Knight — prosecutor Victor Perez wanted to make sure people knew where the city's "Puerto Rican community" stood.

"As the chief prosecutor for the city of Cleveland, born and raised ...

It's hard out here for a black man the Internet accidentally thrusts into the limelight. Those 15 minutes ain't no joke.

Charles Ramsey, the Cleveland man who helped Amanda Berry escape from her captor and free her fellow captives, is already a full-fledged Thing On The Internet, primarily owing ...

The Atlantic's Ta-Nehisi Coates has a comments section on his blog that's become renowned for its level of discourse. "I always tell people it's like a dinner party, and I try to host it that way," Coates told NPR's On The Media. "I try to keep the conversation ...

A relatively high-profile black man came out this week. And with it, a hardy old narrative got another moment in the sun.

When Jason Collins, a journeyman NBA center, announced that he was gay, many commentators who applauded his disclosure still nodded to the idea of heightened opposition to gay ...

"I'm a 34-year-old NBA center. I'm black. And I'm gay."

That declaration yesterday by the journeyman NBA big man Jason Collins in Sports Illustrated sent shock waves around the sports world. As you've probably heard by now, Collins is the first player in a major professional American team sport to ...

We've known about the gap in wealth between white Americans and black and Latino Americans for some time. Just last year, the Census revealed that whites had about 22 times the wealth of African-Americans and 15 times the wealth of Latinos — and those numbers only got worse over ...

After our post the other day about the surprising incarceration rates in Wisconsin — the state incarcerates more black men than any other in the country — we started thinking a bit about some other stories and studies we've seen recently that deal with race and incarceration. Taken together, ...

Early Tuesday morning, the Brown University crew team discovered a body floating in the water off India Point Park in Providence, R.I.

Today the body was identified as that of Sunil Tripathi, a missing Brown University student who for a few hours was erroneously identified on social media sites ...

What is going on in Wisconsin?

A new study from the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee that looked at the prison population there found that the state has the highest percentage of incarcerated black men in the country. About 1 in 8 black men of working age (13 percent) are in ...

A week after the marathon bombings in Boston, we're still trying to make sense of just what motivated the Tsarnaev brothers, the two suspects in the attacks.

One big question that's been central to a lot of conversations we keep seeing: just what race do the Tsarnaev brothers belong to? ...