Grocery shopping with my mother — At Jitney Jungle, you filled our cart with cream of mushroom soup, tuna, name-brand wheat bread, and a big bottle of off-brand cranberry juice. I asked you if I could get the latest issue of Right On! magazine because Salt-N-Pepa were on the cover. You told me you’d get me…

Why do disadvantaged people spend money on status symbols? For the same reason we all do. — Every time there is a national news story about a black shopper getting harassed in a store, there is a predictable backlash to the miscarriage of justice. We tend to move quickly from being outraged that it happened to critiquing why a black person was shopping there at all. Much…

We all know it’s harder to ID people of different races, but our bias goes so much deeper — The Asian women were easy targets. They were a group the robbers predicted would not resist: middle-aged, frail, unfamiliar with English, and — crucially — unable to identify the black teenagers who snatched the purses from their arms. It was 2014, and I had just begun analyzing data on racial…

In my time at Teen Vogue, not everyone was keen to celebrate my triumphs with me — From all of my closed-door talks over the years with successful people of color, female leaders, young innovators, and especially Black female bosses, it seems there is a universality to some of the challenges we face in the workplace. When we achieve something big, we are often told we are…

Zora Neale Hurston’s 1930s study of Haitian voodoo culture showed her a new category between life and death — When Zora Neale Hurston stepped ashore in Port-au-Prince, in September 1936, Haiti was in the middle of what local officials were calling its second independence. Since an armed revolution in 1791, which eventually threw off French rule, periods of relative stability had alternated with coups, assassinations, a peasant revolt, and…

Emerging technologies could soon allow archaeologists to virtually excavate an entire site within an hour — In many ways, archaeology is still conducted in much the same way it has been for centuries. A single archaeological team might work at a particular dig site for more than 40 years, carefully excavating, studying, preserving, and documenting their findings, and they would barely scratch the surface.

My whole life, my mother told me, ‘Always remember — you’re a Madison. You come from African slaves and a president.’ — President Madison did not have children with his wife, Dolley. Leading scholars believe he was impotent, infertile, or both. But the stories I have heard since my childhood say that James Madison, a Founding Father of our nation, was also a founding father of my African American family.

As a woman with a wooden leg, Virginia Hall was an unlikely spy. That’s what made her so good. — In June 1940, England was afraid. France had capitulated to the Nazis after just six weeks of fighting, and nothing separated the island nation from its foe any longer but the turbulent waters of the English Channel. In order to fight for its very survival, England would need to infiltrate…

In good ways and bad, the Golden Arches have always loomed large in the African American experience — “Hands up . . .” “Don’t shoot!” Across the streets of Ferguson, Missouri, protesters and mourners shouted the call-and-response dirge in memory of Michael Brown Jr. For weeks, traditional news outlets and amateur digital storytellers broadcast updates on the uprising that disrupted life in the town of 21,000. Ferguson’s landmarks…