Shaun King is a 36-year-old Atlanta-based activist who has played a prominent role in anti-racism movements such as Black Lives Matter. He publicly identifies as “black or biracial” and is the son, according to a 2012 profile, of “a Caucasian mother and an African-American father.” Yesterday, however, the nativist website Breitbart.com began questioning King’s story of his upbringing, and focused on purported evidence suggesting that his father is in fact white. King eventually dismissed Breitbart’s questions as the work of a “white supremacist conspiracy,” but not before further inflaming a debate that has since mesmerized conservative media circles.

Without dwelling on the progressive policies of decades past, and how they sometimes failed the communities they were designed to safeguard, I’d like to discuss an editorial written by my colleague, Hamilton Nolan (“Don’t Piss on Your Best Friend”), which argues against the recent protest of Bernie Sanders by individuals associated with the Black Lives Matter movement and suggests black protestors don’t know what’s really in their best interest.

On Saturday, Bernie Sanders was scheduled to speak to a crowd of thousands of supporters in a Seattle park. He never did; the event was shut down after a handful of protesters disrupted it in the name of “Black Lives Matter.” This was remarkably dumb.

If the purpose of protest is to move the needle of public opinion on a particular issue, the Black Lives Matter movement can be considered a success so far, according to a new Washington Post poll. If the poll’s numbers are accurate, many more Americans are concerned about black rights than were a year ago, before Ferguson.

New York Attorney Gen. Eric Schneiderman will investigate the death of Raynette Turner, who was found dead in a Mount Vernon jail cell on August 27. This will be Schneiderman’s first case since being named special prosecutor for police-related civilian deaths. Turner was the fifth black woman to die in police custody in July.

For the past two weeks, I have carried Sandra Bland with me everywhere I go. At first, it was a smiling image of her that haunted my thoughts; she is dressed in what looks to be a black blazer and white blouse, one of her baby locs creeping out of place and sitting squarely on her forehead. She’s wearing big earrings, the sort that you get from an African fair. Here, Sandra (I can’t refer to her as “Bland,” we are too intimately connected now) looks like she makes #BlackLivesMatter videos and goes to sorority chapter meetings in serious heels that replace flats at the door and that don’t stick around long after adjournment. She is one of us, one of ours, absolutely.

The night after Michael Brelo was acquitted for the 2012 shooting death of unarmed Timothy Russell and Malissa Williams, I started writing. There is a certain burden of clarity and urgency that hangs over the writer, which he or she must ultimately answer to. But the weight of things was especially heavy this night. How ought I to reckon with the taking of another’s life in such brutal fashion? Brelo, an Iraq war veteran, pumped 49 shots into the car of Russell and Williams until they were no more. For that, he received the state’s mercy.

There will be no justice for Rekia Boyd, the 22-year-old unarmed Chicago woman who was fatally shot by an off-duty cop in 2012.

I read Akiba Solomon for the first time in the early 2000s when she was a senior editor at The Source magazine. While Akiba's penchant for crafting sentences was on par with some of the greatest scribes of that era, it was her ability to structure features, interviews, and investigative pieces that made the fledgling young writer in me so jealous. This underappreciated ability to thoughtfully and imaginatively curate and structure prose is most wonderfully on display in the book she co-edited with Ayana Byrd, Naked: Black Women Bare All About Their Skin, Hair, Hips, Lips, and Other Parts. As the current editorial director of Colorlines, Akiba has written and edited some of the most important pieces in the country around intersectional (in)justice. We are incredibly lucky that she agreed to be a part of our Times Six series.

We’re celebrating the Fourth of July at my cousin’s McMansion in Lake Mary, Florida, a short stroll across a golf course to the Sanford line. I’m surrounded by kinfolk I haven’t seen since the last funeral. We’re sipping sweet wine, Baileys, and beer. We’re telling the stories we always tell, and stories I’ve never heard.

Few young creative writers in our world write so curiously and honestly out of our varied black American literary tradition as Andrew Elias Colarusso. The biracial son of an Afro-Puerto Rican mother and an Italian American father; Andrew writes, "Because I did and do have a loving relationship with my (white) biological father I cannot dismiss the whiteness he has come to represent without dismissing a part of who I am."

I met Marlon Peterson in 2009, a few months after he'd completed ten years of a 12-year sentence for first degree assault and third degree weapons possession. While Marlon was inside, I read his blog and some of the correspondences he'd exchanged with Nadia Lopez's eighth graders. I was amazed not simply by Marlon's generous precision in the letters, but by how descriptive and honest Ms. Lopez's students responded to his prose. Without a drop of condescension, Marlon's letters encouraged the students to reckon with their thoughts, feelings, senses, and imaginations.

Growing up in a predominantly white, middle-class neighborhood in Seattle I remember my mother warning my older brother not to be caught running after dark, and, if ever stopped by police, to do whatever they asked—no more and no less. Speak as little as possible, she'd say. Every suggestion was a weak attempt to minimize a danger that would exist regardless. My brother would always be a black male.

When a friend introduced me to the work of a theoretical physicist named Dr. Chanda Hsu Prescod-Weinstein, I had no idea what a "theoretical physicist" was. Whatever the work of theoretical physicists, I didn't imagine that there was one in our country who would say to a group of grad students at MIT, "Do not be afraid to be black, whatever that means to you. Do not be afraid to be black scientists. Do not be afraid to be black and simultaneously successful, whatever field you choose. For each individual, that may require creating something new and spectacular. Do not capitulate to the fear that you are not up to this glorious task."

Azealia Banks has a new ally in her ongoing-and-occasionally-hilarious Twitter feud with rapper Iggy Azalea—the collective hacking organization Anonymous, which has threatened to release stills from an alleged Azalea sex tape unless she issues a public apology to Banks.

On Wednesday, after the announcement that NYPD Officer Daniel Pantaleo would not be indicted for killing Eric Garner, the NAACP's Legal Defense Fund Twitter posted a series of tweets naming 76 men and women who were killed in police custody since the 1999 death of Amadou Diallo in New York. Starting with the most recent death, what follows are more detailed accounts of many of those included in the Legal Defense Fund's tweets.

There isn't enough ink to express our pain. Day after day, month after month, year after year, the pain of being black in America, and across the globe, is apparent. Yesterday I read the headlines and tweets that told me NYPD Officer Daniel Pantaleo, the cop that killed Eric Garner, would not be indicted. Daniel Pantaleo—say his name until it cannot be forgotten, until he's held responsible. A week and three days before that I heard news out of Ferguson, Missouri that Darren Wilson would not be indicted. That same day, hours before, I watched my beautiful daughter be born into this world. Being black is like that: valley, peak, valley.

At a September townhall meeting in Harlem, Carl Dix, a longtime Uptown fixture and mouthpiece, stood before the microphone in the auditorium of the Schomburg Center and called for mass rebellion. "It's going to take a revolution," he said, "nothing less, to end this and the horrors of the system once and for all."