Thomas Chatterton Williams, a fierce critic of identity politics, urges readers to move beyond a black-white binary in discussing or thinking about race in the United States.

Since the outbreak of Covid-19, I have thought often about Sister Mary Anthony Duchemin and the extraordinary sacrifice that she made to the church and community at large in 1832.

I have traveled all over the world, yet I have never felt the need to hide my ethnicity until now, in my own hometown, New York City.

In the middle lands of these 40 days, I am burdened by the fact that our society has not yet reckoned with the ongoing sin of capital punishment nor the full extent of our country’s racist past.

The Dominican sisters are motivated by a recognition that the blinding racism that allowed nuns to buy and sell human beings in the past could blind them to their own complicity in racist structure today.

When Anne Marie Becraft established her school in the midst of the nation’s and the church’s slaveholding elite, she powerfully declared that the lives of black people, especially women and girls, mattered.