Good News about Gospel
Foot-Stomping Choirs Cross Racial Boundaries
By Amelia Hansen

It was standing room only on a recent Sunday morning at the Bronx Christian Fellowship Church when David Brown stepped to the altar and the piano began to pound. About 40 singers, crowded on the stage behind him, began swaying to the rock 'n' roll rhythm. The predominantly African-American congregation started clapping in unison. Brown smiled, shook his hips, raised his hands and, on queue, the choir broke into song, filling the little church to its high wood rafters. Full Story

Adopting a Culture:
One Woman's Struggle for a Korean Identity
By Ryan Teague Beckwith

Kristin Rutherford didn't discover that the correct term for her ethnicity is Asian — not Oriental — until she was a freshman in college. "I had a friend who was half-Chinese and had grown up in Beijing," she said while eating lunch recently at a diner on Manhattan's Upper East Side. "I used the word in passing and she corrected me. ... She said, 'Oriental only refers to rugs and lamps.' It makes sense to me." Full Story

Identity Squeeze
What Irks Mixed-Race Americans in Daily Life
By Aetna Smith

For the son, it came while he was in the Army. For the mother, it happened at a birthday party.

Five years ago, Shane Hachey was at a party near his Fort Hood base in Texas. Most of the guests were of Mexican descent. Given his racial heritage of white, Native American and black, he probably blended in, he said. Then, talk turned to black basketball stars, Hachey recalled. As the discussion heated up, a young Mexican man began asking guests in turn: "Are you a nigger lover or a nigger hater?" One after the other said he was a hater. Full Story

Crossing a Great Divide
Diversity Grows Slowly in Chinatown
By Kelly Morgan

Her friends know her as Regina, but she also answers to Xiao Jun, at least when her grandparents from her mother's side of the family call. It means "dawn in the fields where the cows graze," and she is called this because, according to her Chinese heritage, she was born in the year of the bull. Today she is 16. Full Story

Great Expectations
Prep-Educated Rapper Carves Own Path
By Nick Spangler

Malik Burke seemed like the right fit for an up-from-the-streets success story. He was 12, a black kid from Jamaica, Queens, a working-class neighborhood at the end of the E train line. His parents split when he was 6 months old and after that, he lived with his mother and little brother, seeing his dad a couple weekends a month. His mother had a good job as public school teacher but money was tight. Full Story

Last Chance?
Black Students Isolated in Long Island
By Zubin Jelveh

Sometimes, Roger Brooks is afraid to walk home from school. Twice in the past year, he has been accosted by fellow students at Roosevelt High School in suburban Long Island. They see him as an easy target, he said. A 15-year-old junior, Brooks is of average height but is rail thin and often cannot run from his aggressors because the books he carries weigh him down. Full Story

Budding Influence
One Man's Effort to Awaken Asian Voters
By Sean Nealon

When the service at the Full Gospel New York Church in Flushing, Queens, let out at 12:15 p.m., John Park immediately went to work. The president of the four-year-old Korean American Empowerment Council knew the after-church lunch was a big deal. Full Story

Cold Shoulder
Black Gay Writers Often Face Denial
By Christopher Lawton

For 21 years, James Earl Hardy maintained military-like silence about his sexual orientation. When he broke the silence, his cousin Irene was the first he told that he was gay. She was not surprised, he said. No one in his family was surprised, just uncomfortable talking about it. Full Story

Portrait of a Museum
The Changing World of Black Art in Harlem
By Rhonda Roumani

Street vendors up and down the bustling Harlem thoroughfare of 125th Street sell incense, religious books, and prints of conspicuous, flashy artwork. Some of them hold a permanent seat to the right of a newly painted white building with a green-glass colored façade. Sandwiched between electronic and beauty stores, the building almost seems out of place. Full Story

Stray dumbbells and a pair of small black pumps cluttered the office floor of J and A Housekeeping but the wood surface glistened like a brand new penny. There's no doubt that this space in the Bronx gets full use because it serves as both home and office for Juliet Anderson, owner of J and A. Full Story

Between Two Worlds
The Islamic Conversion of Mary Am Beulen
By Amy Miller

Mary Am Beulen stood in line last October for a cup of coffee at a Starbucks near her home in Astoria, Queens, as three construction workers waited behind her, elbowing one another. Then one said, "Damn Arabs. Why don't you just go home?" She whirled around, and said, "Well you better take another look because this ain't no Arab." Full Story

Modern Matchmaker
Premarital Tests Help Hasidim Avert Genetic Disease
By Alex Shimo-Barry

From across a Brooklyn coat store, she looked like an acceptable wife. She was pretty, with camel color eyes and brown hair. Israel, a 26-year-old Hasidic Jew, had never spoken to her, but with just one look he decided she was the girl he had been waiting for. "She had clean clothes and was very well put together," said Israel, who spoke on the condition that his family name was not used. Full Story

White Anti-Racists
They Battle Bigotry from the Inside Out
By Jean Gordon

Two days after the World Trade Center attack, Ari Zwartjes crammed into a packed Lower East Side auditorium with 300 political activists. Zwartjes was there to plan an anti-war response to the patriotic groundswell taking hold across the country. Though the meeting drew people from diverse causes — from halting the U.S. Navy's bombing in Vieques, to establishing a Palestinian state, to freeing convicted murderer Mumia Abu-Jamal — most of the people in the room, like Zwartjes, were white. And she soon became dismayed. Full Story

In the House
For Black Firefighters, Fitting In Takes Time
By Eli Stokols

Daryl Fordham set a mug of steaming coffee onto the wooden desk and reached for the TV remote. It was just after 9:30 a.m. on another weekday morning, and the beginning of the young firefighter's 24-hour shift. Fordham, a probationary firefighter — or "probie," as they're called — was assigned to Ladder Company 25 on Manhattan's Upper West Side in January. In his four months on the job, Fordham has gotten used to the solitude of the "watch," the room at the front of the house where the junior man on duty usually waits for calls to come in. Full Story

Blending Black and White
Fort Greene Thrives on Middle Class Diversity
By Joanna Gonzales

Morning services were over, but something was still happening on a recent Sunday inside Fort Greene's Lafayette Presbyterian Church — something loud. The deep, rhythmic "boom" of African drums vibrated the walls of one of the church's many meeting rooms, competing with a child's first birthday party next door, where interracial guests — some of them white in polo shirts, others black in vibrant kente cloth — laughed with their children and ate chocolate cake. Full Story

Times of Trouble
Families of INS Detainees Suffer in Silence
By Maureen Nandini Mitra

On Sunday, Nov. 11, 2001, Mohammad Akram knelt in a corner of his discount store on Brighton Beach Avenue in Brooklyn and said his afternoon prayers. The 45-year-old Pakistani immigrant gave thanks to Allah for the good life he had been granted and prayed for the well being of his wife and six children.
Full Story

Unwed and Waiting
South Asian Bachelors Create Their Own Family
By Aruna Jain

They stand inside their cramped newsstand on 82nd Street and Broadway, two young bachelors from a distant continent, dark eyed and looking perpetually weary. It's 6 p.m. and Adil Mohammed gives change to customers while his friend and roommate, Ali Osman Yousuf, talks quietly on a cell phone. Then Adil scoots out of the shack, grabs the Sunday TV guide from the New York Daily News and heads home to their apartment in Jackson Heights, Queens. Full Story

Who Do We Let In?
One Man's Struggle with Immigration Law
By Jodie Kirshner

In February 2000, Seth Sarfoh Rich's boss gave him a false passport, $30 cash and a ticket from Africa to Newark International Airport in New Jersey. "I had no choice than to fly him out to a safer and quiet country," the boss, George Osei, wrote in a sworn petition letter. Rich, a farmer, had been involved in a land dispute with Ghanaian authorities. As a result, police had killed Rich's daughter, mother and father. Full Story

Read the 2001 Anthology.