Race/Related: Black Like Me?

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November 9, 2019

By Lauretta Charlton

Race/Related Editor

Over the last few weeks I've had a song by the soul singer Syl Johnson stuck in my head. Released in 1969, "Is It Because I'm Black" is a very funky, grief-filled tune about America's failed promises to African-Americans.

Something is holding me back. Is it because I'm black?

I thought about the song a lot while editing an article this week about blackness and identity in the United States.

What drew me to the article, written by the National correspondent Farah Stockman, is the notion that there is a very specific segment of the black population that has been left behind, and that as the nation's demographics continue to change, they may be slipping farther out of reach.

Many of these men and women live in the South, where Mr. Johnson was born, and far too often they live in entrenched poverty.

Many of them also have ancestral links to slavery. And yet, when we talk about the black population in this country, that lived experience — centuries of trauma, really — is often overlooked or taken for granted.

Here is an article about attempting to recognize that history more fully, as well as the pitfalls of trying to turn an identity debate into a political movement.

Danielle Scruggs for The New York Times

'We're Self-Interested': The Growing Identity Debate in Black America

Why a movement that claims to support the American descendants of slavery is being promoted by conservatives and attacked on the left.

By Farah Stockman

The Story of the Great Japanese-American Novel

John Okada's "No-No Boy" captures the injustice of incarcerating Japanese-Americans during World War II — and serves as a warning today for our own fractured society.

By Thessaly La Force

White Manager Who Abused and Didn't Pay Black Cook Gets 10 Years in Prison

The manager beat the cook, who has an intellectual disability, with his fists, pots and pans, and once burned him with hot metal tongs, prosecutors said.

By Laura M. Holson

Todd Heisler/The New York Times

U.S. Must Provide Mental Health Services to Families Separated at Border

Under a "state-created danger" legal doctrine, a judge ordered the government to provide counseling and other services to compensate for trauma.

By Miriam Jordan

Brittany Greeson for The New York Times

Flint's Children Suffer in Class After Years of Drinking the Lead-Poisoned Water

The city's schools, stretched even before the lead crisis, are struggling with demands for individualized education programs and behavioral interventions for children with high lead exposure.

By Erica L. Green

Wayne Lawrence for The New York Times

With a Slave Rebellion Re-enactment, an Artist Revives Forgotten History

Dread Scott is organizing a re-enactment in Louisiana that asks people to think about who the real heroes were in the 19th-Century South.

By Richard Fausset and Wayne Lawrence

Katherine Taylor for The New York Times

Boston, Long Led by White Men, Votes in New Guard

Voters backed progressive women and people of color to usher in a City Council more diverse than any in Boston's history.

By Ellen Barry

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