Last week, Code Switch raised the curtain on "The Obama Effect," our quest to understand what the nation's first black president has to do with the big national conversations on identity and inclusion swirling in full force right now.

That quest began with you. On Friday, we took to ...

Onstage, Misty Copeland's career revolves — chaînés? — around making hard work look easy. She breezes through Under Armour commercials and brisés through book signings, but she's most famous for defying gravity onstage with American Ballet Theatre. ABT's first black principal dancer, Copeland has been lighting up the ...

In 1996, when Dominque Dawes became the first black woman to win an individual gymnastics medal at the Atlanta Summer Olympics, critics said her look wasn't quite right.

In 2012, Gabby Douglas became the first black woman to win the title of individual all-around champion at the London Summer ...

Once in a blue moon*, the film industry makes a decision that leaves us speechless. We'd barely gotten our balance after laugh-crying over #OscarsSoWhite before Thursday's big reveal: the decision to cast white actor Joseph Fiennes as Michael Jackson in a new 9/11 ensemble road trip comedy. We ...

There's been a lot of conversation lately about people of color dealing with "only one in the room" syndrome in the workplace. But in 2016, it's still remarkably easy to be the only person of color in any given social situation. My Code Switch teammate Gene Demby and I ...

On Monday, a grand jury decided not indict Timothy Loehmann, the Cleveland police officer who shot and killed 12-year-old Tamir Rice in November 2014. At time of the shooting, Rice was in a park, playing with an air gun he had borrowed from a friend. Loehmnann fired his weapon at ...

In an interview with NPR's Steve Inskeep late last week, President Obama spoke at length on the subject of identity. The question of who we are as Americans, Obama said, is at the center of the American experience and has been since the country's founding. We wanted to share that ...

For a busy man, André Mack is remarkably chill. He runs two companies, designs labels and coloring books and wine pun T-shirts (one reads "Beaune Thugs"), is in an upcoming documentary on minority winewakers in Oregon, and does some wristwatch modeling on the side (it's exactly what it ...

Spike Lee's latest, Chi-Raq, is designed to provoke: women in Chicago's south side go on a "sex strike" to curb gang violence, cribbing from Lysistrata, Aristophanes' comic account of the Peloponnesian War. Unsurprisingly, reactions are polarized. Detractors say it's exploitative, unfair, and sexist. Fans say it's sexy, visually riveting, and ...

It's time to stop dancing around the issue. Thanksgiving food is trash. Sitting down to a standard Thanksgiving meal means negotiating between dry and bland or lukewarm and sticky. But it doesn't have to be. If there's one thing we learned the first time around, it's that Thanksgiving is all ...

The world of children's lit has always traded in grisly topics — children's literature scholar Jerry Griswold deems "scariness" one of the five elemental themes of the genre. There's unalloyed cannibalism in "Hansel and Gretel"; "The Boy Who Cried Wolf" is the story of an exaggerator in short ...

Pull up your pants. Calm down. Get good grades. Stop the violence. Buy a gun. Fix your hair. Go to church. Have a normal name. Speak properly. Be polite. Put your hands up. Stop loitering. Go inside. ...

Some new research suggests that ending America's devastating problems with school segregation is good for white kids, too. Over at NPR Ed, our colleague Anya Kamenetz describes these findings:

"Diverse schools, especially when kids attend them at an early age, are linked to cross-racial friendships," says [Virginia ...

It was 2 p.m. at the Code Switch desk and conversation turned, as it often does in post-post-lunch stupor, to snacks. Who had some? Who needed some? Why does the NPR cafeteria close so early? (It's called, are you ready for this, Sound Bites.) Doesn't anyone have a Toblerone stashed ...

Teach for America gets young people to teach at some of the nation's poorest, brownest schools, and the organization has enjoyed largely uncritical public adoration for most of its 25 years. But over the past few years, former teachers have been raising serious questions about TFA's mission and treatment of ...

A Muslim pop culture website: The idea seemed so obvious, Zainab Khan waited years for someone else to make one. A place for jokes about nosy aunties, sharing hijab hacks and Ramadan recipes, and advice on navigating Minder (yup, there's a Muslim Tinder).

But existing sites for young Muslims tended ...

Actress Viola Davis took home an Emmy on Sunday night for her role as defense lawyer Annalise Keating on ABC's How to Get Away with Murder. The moment marked the first time in the Emmys' 67-year history that the award for Best Actress in a Drama went to a black ...