On Tuesday, February 23th, local Police discovered the body Emilsen Manyoma, a fearless leader of a network of Black and indigenous community organizations. Sister-Warrior-Queen Emilsen was ruthlessly murdered and beheaded; her body left to bleed out on the very land she dedicated her life to protect.

Afro-Colombians have long been targets of racial violence, an effect of the country’s decades-old civil war that has displaced an estimated two million Afro-Colombians. Over 200 Afro-Colombians and indigenous leaders were killed in 2016, many of them young men between the ages of 13 and 25 years old.

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“Do you speak English?”

When Hua-Yu Sebastian Cherng walked into his summer school classroom for the first time as a brand-new teacher, a student greeted him with this question. Nothing in his training had prepared him to address race and identity. But he was game, answering the student lightly, “Yes, I do, but this is a math class, so you don’t have to worry about it.”

“Oh my gosh, was that racist?” he says the girl asked, and quickly checked her own assumption: “‘That’s exactly like when I go into a store and people follow me around because I’m black.'”

During the time that Cherng, who is of Chinese descent, taught in an 85 percent African-American middle school in San Francisco, he enjoyed a good rapport with his students, and he wondered what role his own identity played in that.

Now Cherng is a sociologist at New York University and he’s just published a paper with colleague Peter Halpin that addresses this question. It seems that students of all races — white, black, Latino, and Asian — have more positive perceptions of their black and Latino teachers than they do of their white teachers.

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It is November 2, 1930, and National Geographic has sent a reporter and a photographer to cover a magnificent occasion: the crowning of Haile Selassie, King of Kings of Ethiopia, Conquering Lion of the Tribe of Judah. There are trumpets, incense, priests, spear-wielding warriors. The story runs 14,000 words, with 83 images.

If a ceremony in 1930 honoring a black man had taken place in America, instead of Ethiopia, you can pretty much guarantee there wouldn’t have been a story at all. Even worse, if Haile Selassie had lived in the United States, he would almost certainly have been denied entry to our lectures in segregated Washington, D.C., and he might not have been allowed to be a National Geographic member. According to Robert M. Poole, who wrote Explorers House: National Geographic and the World It Made, “African Americans were excluded from membership—at least in Washington—through the 1940s.”

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In 2000, the United Nations hosted the largest gathering of political leaders ever held. At that meeting, all 189 UN member states, plus leading development institutions, committed to the Millennium Development Goals, a set of eight ambitious goals for lifting more than one billion people worldwide out of extreme poverty.

The first goal — to cut extreme poverty and hunger in half by 2015 — was especially important to me, because it was crucial to achieving all the others. It was also controversial: experts thought it was impossible to achieve. But it sparked a global conversation about how to invest in agriculture, nutrition and food systems to ensure a future in which all children get the food they need to thrive, not just to survive.

Talk led to action, and action to results. Between 2000 and 2015, nearly every African country improved childhood nutrition, especially in reducing stunted growth caused by malnutrition. For example, in Burkina Faso, stunting in children younger than 5 dropped from 42% in 2006 to 27% in 2016. In Ghana, my home country, rates fell from 36% to 19% between 2003 and 2014.

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On a recent, chilly Sunday morning, children ranging in age from 4 to 6 waited with their parents in the cafeteria of a Brooklyn school. Each wore a name tag.

The kids chatted cheerfully (in several languages) until each was summoned upstairs to be tested for a spot in New York City’s gifted program. Their parents sent them off with hugs and the promise of special treats for doing their best.

When a student is identified as “gifted,” the label is a vote of confidence — as in the indelible Nina Simone song. It also comes with a prize package: extra services, accelerated classes, individualized learning plans. The availability of these services varies widely from district to district. The chances of being identified as gifted also varies — notably, by race.

A new, national study finds that black students are about half as likely as white students to be put on a “gifted” track — even when they have comparable test scores.

Previous surveys have found a similar gap, but the researchers here — Jason Grissom and Christopher Redding at Vanderbilt University — looked only at students attending schools with gifted programs. So the disparity can’t be accounted for by, say, the fact that black students are more likely to attend under-resourced schools.

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