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By The Color Of Their Skin

Tim Wise On The Myth Of A Postracial America

Some think that racism ended with the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the Voting Rights Act of 1965, and the Fair Housing Act of 1968. Those were important steps, because they made it illegal to engage in discrimination. But just because you’ve made something illegal doesn’t mean it no longer happens. No enforcement mechanisms existed for the Fair Housing Act until 1988, and evidence suggests there are still millions of cases of race-based housing discrimination every year.

Choosing Sides

A four-page letter, a broken microwave, a game of solitare

Moving In

An apartment swap; a furniture auction; Block 6, Barracks 4, Unit C

Without A Country

Pramila Jayapal On The Problems Immigrants Face

The debate isn’t just about passion; it’s about policies that make sense for this country, are in keeping with our values, and are good for our economy. I don’t want somebody to agree with me because they’re taking pity on an immigrant. I want them to see that immigration reform is the right thing to do.

Saturn Is The Biggest Planet On Earth

I appreciate her boldness, and I respond with a giggle that sounds like her father’s, he who laughs. This kind of conviction can be endearing in a four-year-old, though not so endearing in a talk-show host, nor in the president of a country — people who hold the fate of so many lives in that slender gap between their confidence and their ignorance.

Land Of The Free?

Tram Nguyen On The Backlash Against Immigrants In Post-9/11 America

Really, unless you’re from one of the targeted immigrant communities, you have no idea what’s going on there. Streets are empty. Stores and businesses are closed because people have been detained or deported, or their customers have disappeared, or residents are just afraid to go out. These used to be bustling, vibrant neighborhoods, but if you don’t live there or have reason to visit, you would never know the impact homeland-security policies have had. In the two months following September 11, more than twelve hundred Muslim, Arab, and South Asian men were rounded up for indefinite detention. Then, starting in September 2002, there was “special registration,” where noncitizen males from Islamic countries were required to register with the INS.

Bang, Bang, In A Boy Voice

In 1984, the year vigilante Bernhard Goetz shot four black boys on a New York City subway car, I was nine, and I loved to ride the subway by myself. The dingy trains were spectacular space rockets to me. When I rode them, I wasn’t just going to Queens to visit my grandmother; I was saving the galaxy.

The Apology

When I was a boy, I lived in the country about fifty miles outside of San Antonio, Texas. Our house was a trailer my father had set up on large cedar posts, three feet in the air. He covered the space below with aluminum siding and added a front porch to give the trailer a more houselike appearance. We had an above-ground pool, too.