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The NAACP president gives the president “wide latitude,” but wishes Obama would focus more on one issue: criminal justice reform.

Obama’s election surprised the NAACP president’s grandfather—but not Jealous, who saw it as another “big and impossible dream” that black Americans would prove possible.

The man who organized MLK Jr.’s march on Washington was gay; so is Ben Jealous’s brother. The NAACP president thinks LGBT activists could find their staunchest allies in African-Americans—if they […]

Environmental catastrophe affects everyone, yet the green movement is mostly white. What can be done to bring minorities into the fold?

As old forms of discrimination disappear, new ones arise. The NAACP president describes an injustice that’s hitting particularly hard during the recession.

Education reform was “job one” for the NAACP in the last century. Sadly, despite progress in other areas, it still is.

Why is a subject long treated as a joke now drawing serious attention? Because white-collar criminals are coming forward with horror stories.

How the American justice system turns petty (and mostly black) criminals angry, desperate, and dangerous.

From battling the black incarceration rate to retooling public education, the NAACP’s 21st-century platform is nothing short of a “broad domestic human rights movement.”

The NAACP president grew up hearing that civil rights was a settled issue, only to find that cancerous racial problems still persisted.

An interview with the president of the NAACP.

After the Copenhagen Climate Council was considered a failure, how should we prepare for COP-16 in Mexico? Big Think’s live roundtable on March 26, 2010 in Houston was moderated by […]

The historian and artist names some contemporary masters whose work deserves wider recognition.

Yes, Nell Irvin Painter is a painter. But she didn’t start pursuing an art MFA until she’d already become a distinguished Princeton historian. What prompted the shift in gears?

The author of “The History of White People” believes racial attitudes are starting to relax in the Obama era. Class differences, though, remain as problematic as ever.

The concept of race may be a kind of cultural superstition, but in America at least, it’s not going away anytime soon.

How did Italians, Jews, and other peoples become “white”? And will other, currently “nonwhite” ethnic groups follow suit?

Ralph Waldo Emerson was a vocal abolitionist, yet also romanticized a “Saxon” racial ideal. How should we make sense of his attitudes—and untangle them from our own?

Race is a 19th-century concept. In the 18th century, the division of human “varieties” was just as arbitrary—but a little more creative.

When did the concept of race originate? And was there no such thing as racism before it did? The author of “The History of White People” explains.

A conversation with the professor of American history at Princeton.

Humans have not acknowledged the degree to which we are a dangerous species. Life is safer if we recognize the dangers and anticipate them.

There will be a day when our food will be piped into our houses in some form of algomash that we can then turn into the equivalent of today’s hamburgers […]

Will raw foodists evolve differently from humans who eat cooked food?

We have the smallest guts of all primates, and the biggest brains. Blame cooking.

Creationism is simply part of the package for many religious people in the U.S.

Having more females in positions of power could reduce aggression in our society.

The legendary primatologist would produce a few great observations on how to behave and then would just let you run, he says.

There is evidence that humans are predisposed to behave violently in certain contexts. But the more we’re aware of it, the more we can do about it.

A conversation with the Harvard primatologist.