“Racism” is the easy answer to the question of how America’s prisons got so full of African Americans. A new book offers a more complex and hopeful view.

The old debate between W.E.B. Du Bois and Booker T. Washington lives on, but the terms have been flipped on their heads.

American society is neither post-racial nor stuck fast in a racist past, but fantasies of monolithic racial communities are distorting our national conversation on race and public policy.