Whether you love or hate politics, it’s hard to deny that when it comes to identity and culture, this year’s presidential election is truly historic. The incumbent is, of course, half black and thus, a racial minority. The challenger is Mormon, and thus, a religious minority. What if you’re one of the one million Americans who is both black and Mormon? How does identity factor in? Two African-American Mormons join us today to share their thoughts.

Few sports have been more racially divided than golf. Realizing that the NCAA was not inviting athletes from historically black colleges and Hispanic- and Native American-serving institutions to compete in their regional golf tournaments, the PGA Minority Collegiate Golf Championship was created to open the doors. In recent years, however, there appear to be fewer and fewer minorities in the PGA Minority Collegiate Golf Championship.

In 2007, during his contentious primary race with Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama spent a week campaigning with Newark Mayor Corey Booker and Massachusetts Governor Deval Patrick. The media continually highlighted the difference between these three young, African-American politicians and the generation of black leaders that came before them. A new book by Professor Andra Gillespie examines the new generation of black politicians exemplified by President Obama through the lens of Cory Booker's mayoral election and his tenure in Newark.

When Sen. John McCain conceded the presidency to Barack Obama, McCain said: "A century ago, President Theodore Roosevelt's invitation of Booker T. Washington to dine at the White House was taken as an outrage in many quarters. America today is a world away from the cruel and frightful bigotry of that time." Author Deborah Davis chronicles that dinner, its aftermath, and the lives of Roosevelt and Washington in her new book.

In a column that quickly got him fired from his post at National Review, John Derbyshire offered some parental advice that he gives his own children when teaching them about the African-American community. This advice, he says, "may save their lives." One point he argues is that the "mean intelligence of blacks is much lower than for whites.” Much has been written about the falsity of his claims and the racist undertones of his overall argument. But derbyshire is correct in writing that there are "no black Fields Medal winners." Jonathan Farley is a professor of mathematics and recipient of the Harvard Foundation's Scientist of the Year medal in 2004. He explains why no African-Americans have yet to receive the prestigious Fields Medal.

The commonalities and tensions between the black and Latino communities in the United States — and in particular, in the American south — have been a source of much discussion in the Trayvon Martin case. On yesterday's program, Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Isabel Wilkerson mentioned some dramatic statistics on how blacks and Latinos in the American south perceive one another. Duke researchers found that an overwhelming majority of Latinos in Durham, North Carolina, 78 percent, felt they had the most in common with whites. What’s more, nearly 60 percent of Latinos surveyed reported they believed that few or almost no blacks were hard-working or could be trusted.

All this week, we’re talking about incarceration in America. Today we're focusing on life after prison, and what happens to former inmates once they're released. Joining us is Michelle Alexander, author of "The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness" and law professor at Ohio State University, and Susan Burton, Founder and Executive Director of A New way of Life Re-Entry Project, a nonprofit dedicated to helping women break the cycle of incarceration.

When President Obama became the first black president in 2008, it seemed to mark a tremendous historical turning point for black representation in American political life. But four years later there has been no great renaissance in black electoral representation. If the number of office-holders was demographically proportionate, there would be at least 12 African American senators and six governors. In reality, there are currently no African-American senators and only one African-American governor in office.

It all started with dinner.

In 2004 my husband, John, and I were celebrating our fifth wedding anniversary. That night we were the only Black people at Tru, a five-star restaurant in Chicago’s ultra-exclusive Gold Coast neighborhood. Instead of enjoying the romance of the moment, though, I ruined it by bringing up the discouraging status of Blacks in America. Although we moved on to other topics, they all seemed to lead us back to how fortunate we were and how we should be doing more to help improve the situation— The Black Situation.

February is Black History Month, and comedian Baratunde Thurston wants you to know that it's the perfect time to buy his new book, "How to Be Black." "The odds are high that you acquired this book during the nationally sanctioned season for purchasing black cultural objects, also known as Black History Month," he writes. "If you're like most people, you buy one piece of black culture per year during this month, and I'm banking on this book jumping out at you from the bookshelf or screen." Baratunde Thurston joins Celeste Headlee to discuss his new book: part-memoir, part-satire, part-political commentary.

Like the Iowa caucuses before it, the relevance of New Hampshire's primary has been questioned because of the state's 94 percent white population. Major demographic changes are taking place across the country, increasing diversity in regions that have not traditionally been destinations for Latino immigrants, as well as the shift of affluent, northern-born African-Americans to the south. The Takeaway takes a look at what issues are important to these voters in the 2012 election and beyond.

The narrative of African Americans "passing" into white culture has long persisted. These stories are often tragic and filled with shame, secrecy, and the abandonment of home and family. In his new book, "The Invisible Line," Daniel Sharfstein looks at three families that were once identified as black and are now viewed as white. These stories are ones of pride as white families reconnect with their African-American roots.

One of the most difficult conversations we can have in our society has to do with race. In some ways the conversation is complicated by recent milestone events in racial equality like the election of President Barack Obama. But Jay Smooth says that milestones like that are exactly the reason why we need to think and communicate more effectively about race as such milestones can obfuscate the real inequalities that still remain in our society.

According to the U.S. Census figures from 2010, one in four African-Americans live in poverty. Less than one in five has a college degree. The question of how to help the community be upwardly mobile has been debated for decades, and it was on the mind of commentator Gene Marks when he wrote a recent commentary for Forbes called "If I Were a Poor Black Kid." "If I was a poor black kid I would get technical. I would learn software," Marks wrote. "I would learn how to write code. I would seek out courses in my high school that teaches these skills or figure out where to learn more online. I would study on my own. I would make sure my writing and communication skills stay polished." Gene Marks is neither black, nor poor, and some people wondered why he would be giving advice to those who are.

A Pew Research Center report released Wednesday shows 51 percent of all adults in the United States are now married — a record low. In 2010, a survey also conducted by Pew found that four in ten Americans thought marriage had become obsolete, but found that most people who had never married (61 percent) would like to do so someday.

The uneasy embrace of slavery in colonial America produced an economic boom, rendered the founder's debates over freedom from kings and despots questionable distortions of truth and logic, slavery enshrined rascism in the U.S. Constitution and made the Civil War inevitable. The War itself created an identity for the United States from which there was no escape, even though it seems from time to time that the Civil War blinks out in relevance. Writer Ta-Nehisi Coates says this narrative has to change. In a piece in this month's Atlantic, Coates says more black Americans need to study the war and their role in it in order to understand their place in history.

For many Americans, keeping a foothold in the middle class is very difficult. A recent report by the Economic Mobility Project of the Pew Charitable Trusts finds that a third of Americans who are born in the middle class lose their middle class status as adults. Another Pew study notes that African Americans experience the most downward mobility — almost half of children born to middle income African American families fall to the bottom of the income ladder as adults.

The NFL has in place a regulation called the Rooney Rule, which demands that every team must interview a minority candidate if a coaching or general manger's position is open. Many would like to see that rule in place in other venues. Robert Johnson, founder of BET, proposed on The Takeaway that if corporate America installed the Rooney Rule, it would "change the number of African Americans employed in higher echelons of corporate America."

The national unemployment level continues to hover around 9 percent. But among African-Americans, that number shoots up to about 16 percent. On Friday’s program The Takeaway spoke with Robert Johnson, founder of BET and CEO or RLJ Companies. Johnson, who was the first African-American to become a billionaire, has a new idea for how to get black Americans out of poverty.

The financial crisis has hit just about every corner of the economy but it has been disproportionately harmful to African-Americans. The unemployment rate among black Americans stands at 16 percent. That's nearly 7 percentage points higher than the unemployment rate of the population as a whole.