2. How ‘Gardening While Black’ Almost Landed This Detroit Man in Jail

For me, the biggest story this year was the numerous accounts of random 911 calls made on black Americans for doing everyday things, like barbecuing, swimming, sitting at Starbucks, golfing, eating at Subway, gardening, walking into their home, leaving a corner store or cashing a paycheck at a bank. The list goes on. Doing any of these things while black made several Americans feel threatened, so much so that they were willing to dial 911. I hope we don’t bring this habit into the new year.

— Pierre-Antoine Louis, News Assistant

3. Louisiana School Made Headlines for Sending Black Kids to Elite Colleges. Here’s the Reality

It’s the education beat that I can’t stop thinking about this year. In story after story — from a school desegregation debate forever unfolding in New York City to Charlottesville, Va., where The New York Times and ProPublica reporters found that zoning policies led to clear racial divides; from the shattering investigation into college prep school T.M. Landry to a Harvard lawsuit about affirmative action — I continue to see systemic racism embedded deeply in the architecture of our schools.

— Sara Simon, Associate Software Engineer

4. Why America’s Black Mothers and Babies Are in a Life-or-Death Crisis

I’m not pregnant, black, a mother or a doctor and went into this story thinking I was a person very much removed from the situation. By the time I finished reading it I was shaking, invested and in mourning because of the meticulous research on the effects of race and class in a for-profit medical system, and how small and irrelevant a person can be made to feel within it. Reproduction is one of the most primal indicators of a species, and you see here how unhealed our nation’s wounds are from deeply systemic racism.

— Tammy Tarng, News Assistant

5. Is Denaturalization the Next Front in the Trump Administration’s War on Immigration?

There were many important immigration stories this year, all highlighting the difficult journeys immigrants have to endure to get into the United States, but we rarely focus on the policies immigrants face once they’re here. Black and brown naturalized American citizens — those who have an accent, those from impoverished countries — still have to deal with the consequences of racist policy decisions every day, and how these decisions create an unrelenting structure of racial hierarchy in the United States.

— Isabella Grullón Paz, News Assistant

6. 17 Black Women Sweep to Judgeships in Texas County

The elections of progressive district attorneys, judges, and sheriffs will reverberate for years, and help reshape our criminal justice system. These progressives — many of whom are people of color — are intent on making the courts more equitable and less damaging to the people who come in contact with them. They have pledged to: focus on reducing incarceration (especially for nonviolent offenses); crack down on police misconduct; revamp a cash bail system that unfairly imprisons poor people; and to use more alternatives to prison.

— Adeel Hassan, Senior Staff Editor