My grandparents lived in Salem, Arkansas, which was an all-white community in the Ozark foothills. One day in the early 1960s, Grandpa was strolling across the town square on his lunch break from his job at the post office. As he walked by the bus depot, a friendly voice called out to him. …

Glancing to his left, Grandpa found himself looking into the face of a man he hadn't seen for almost ...

Psychologists have found an intriguing way to study what it is that we really like and dislike. It's called "affective priming." They print a word over a bouncing dot on a computer screen. If people's response is positive, they push any key with their left hand; if negative—any key with their right.

Too discover our deeper responses, researchers will use subliminal stimulation. They'll print ...

A 2008 ABC News/Washington Post poll of 1,125 U.S. adults (including 201 African Americans) shows that many Americans think race relations are improving:

• When asked if they think race relations in the United States are excellent, good, not so good, or poor, 4 percent said excellent (up 2 percent from 16 years ago); 47 percent said good (up 17 percent); 36 percent said not so good (down from 45 percent); 12 percent said poor (down from 21 percent). The remaining 1 percent was unsure (down from 2 percent).
  

To solve the problem of crime, we first have to address the root cause: human sin.

Though many sociologists of the 19th and early 20th centuries attributed crime to environmental factors like poverty, an inadequate criminal justice system, and racism, landmark studies in the last 30 years have shown that crime is really about wrong moral decisions. For example, in their 17-year-long study The Criminal ...

On Saturday, July 9, 2007, thousands of people, including state and city officials, gathered in Detroit's Hart Plaza for a funeral. They all watched as a horse-drawn carriage made its way through the streets carrying a small pine casket adorned with a black wreath. The funeral, conducted by the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, wasn't for a person, though. It was for the ...

The film Amazing Grace chronicles the efforts of William Wilberforce (Ioan Gruffedd) to end the British Transatlantic slave trade in the 19th century. In this scene, Wilberforce attempts to awaken the consciousness of the public to the horrible practice of the slave trade by arranging for a ship carrying members of Parliament and their wives to stop alongside a slave ship.

As Wilberforce appears, one ...

A story from Malcolm Gladwell's Blink forces you to wrestle with this critical question: what keeps us from seeing people as they truly are?

Blink is a book about "the power of thinking without thinking." It's a look at how choices made in an instant aren't as simple as they seem. In one of his many examples in the book, Gladwell shows how the classical music world realized that their system for auditioning ...

The first time the town of Tubingen, Germany, expelled all of its Jewish residents was in 1477. It soon became a place where anti-Jewish doctrines thrived, especially during World War II. Today, however, the Jerusalem Post reports that not only has a tiny Jewish community returned to the town, but there also exists the Tubingen Offensive Stadtmission Church (TOS). The church has grown to about 250 ...

Catch a Fire tells the real life story of South African Patrick Chamusso, an oil refinery worker who is falsely arrested by the country's anti-terrorism police. Patrick and his wife Precious are jailed and brutally tortured under the leadership of Colonel Nic Vos. To spare his wife, Patrick gives a false confession. Though he is later found innocent, he joins the African National Congress, an outlawed ...

Describing the difficulty of racial reconciliation, one African American church leader tells this story:

It was my third year with the ministry. I got a call from a prominent white Christian leader, asking me to go to lunch with him. As we're sitting down to eat, all of a sudden this guy starts crying.… He explained that God had blessed him—his children were healthy, he was known throughout ...