With a new introduction, the groundbreaking classic Race Matters affirms its position as the bestselling, most influential, and most original articulation of the urgent issues in America?s ongoing racial debate. Cornel West is at the forefront of thinking about race. In Race Matters he addresses a range of issues, from the crisis in black leadership and the myths surrounding black sexuality to affirmative action, the new black conservatism, and the strained relations between Jews and African Americans. He never hesitates to confront the prejudices of all his readers?or wavers in his insistence that they share a common destiny. Bold in its thought and written with a redemptive passion grounded in the tradition of the African-American church, Race Matters is a book that is 

In these five eloquent and passionate pieces (which she gave as the prestigious Reith Lectures for the BBC) Patricia J. Williams asks how we might achieve a world where “color doesn’t matter”–where whiteness is not equated with normalcy and blackness with exoticism and danger. Drawing on her own experience, Williams delineates the great divide between “the poles of other people’s imagination and the nice calm center of oneself where dignity resides,” and discusses how it might be bridged as a first step toward resolving racism. Williams offers us a new starting point–“a sensible and sustained consideration”–from which we might begin to deal honestly with the legacy and current realities of our prejudices.

In the aftermath of several terrorist attacks over the weekend that involve Muslim suspects, we speak with professor Nazia Kazi of Stockton University about her latest article for The Chronicle of Higher

We host a roundtable discussion about the terrorist attacks, and the response to them, in New York, New Jersey and St. Cloud, Minnesota, where a man named Dahir Adan is accused

In New Jersey, lawmakers have recently introduced legislation that would require the state’s attorney general to review every death at the hands of law enforcement. One of the key backers of the

On Christmas Day, 2009, twenty-three-year-old Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab attempted to blow up Northwest Airlines Flight 253 using explosives hidden in his underwear. A string of missed opportunities and errors by government security agencies culminated in what President Obama would declare a “systemic failure.” Is scanning everyone with expensive, high-tech equipment the best use of limited resources? Or should we use the information that we have—the knowledge that, while not all Muslims are terrorists, most terrorists are Muslim.