Melanie Coffee

I think we Americans could take a few pages from the Norwegian playbook, especially when it comes to families.

When we went to visit my husband's family in Norway months ago, we got a good sense of what our life could be like if we lived there. We've long known...

Now that George Zimmerman has been charged in Trayvon Martin's death, I am wondering what's next. I'm not talking about the next steps in the judicial process, I want to know what's next when it comes to America's relationship with race.

The hoodied 17-year-old's killing galvanized hundreds of thousands to...

I should have known by the look in his eyes. The middle-aged white man looked at my chocolate self, then to my light-skinned baby and back to me. "Excuse me," he said walking closer. "But is his father white or Asian?"

I paused. Did he just ask me that? Here?...

I'm a suburban U.S. mom of two boys with a (admittedly) gas-guzzling SUV. We make an OK living and my stresses amount to whether my house is clean enough for visitors, if my kids are meeting their milestones, there's also the lamenting over my muffin top, my career or whether...

When the news broke of the death of cultural icon Don Cornelius, shock and condolences permeated the Twittersphere and beyond.

Alongside all the praise and accolades of the history maker, many suicide prevention advocates were hoping that his apparent suicide would give people an avenue for talking...

All she did was perform a song in the church she loved with the man she loved. Apparently not everyone liked that.

Stella Harville is white and her fiancee, Ticha Chikuni, is black and late last month, the Kentucky church Harville attended since she was a child voted...

Kathy Pacholski did everything right. The 49-year-old mother of three exercised regularly, didn't smoke, didn't do drugs and never, ever drank.

One day, while sitting in her car in a parking lot, she realized something wasn't right. She was lightheaded, it was hard to move, and then -- blank.

"You're one of the clean black people, so my grandma says it's OK if I play with you," my childhood friend said to me.

What did that mean, "clean black people?" Are some of us dirty? I knew her comment was an insult, but my 7-year-old mind tied itself into...

I have an on-again-off-again relationship with white people. I've always been that way.

I grew up in a college town in Kansas in a house on the side of the tracks where I was often the only brown person in my grade at elementary school. If there...