Jamelle Bouie

Jamelle Bouie (born April 12, 1987) is an American journalist and columnist for The New York Times. He was formerly chief political correspondent for Slate magazine. According to David Uberti, writing in the Columbia Journalism Review, Bouie is "one of the defining commentators on politics and race in the Trump era."

Bouie was born in Virginia Beach, Virginia. He graduated from the University of Virginia in 2009. He currently lives in the Washington D.C. area.

Bouie was awarded a writing fellowship in 2010 for the magazine The American Prospect. Then in 2012 he was awarded a Knobler Fellowship at the Nation Institute by the print magazine The Nation. In 2013, Bouie became a staff writer for online magazine The Daily Beast, writing about national politics. In 2014, he moved to Slate magazine as a Chief Political Correspondent. In 2019, he joined The New York Times as a columnist.

In 2013, Bouie was a contributor to Barack Obama and the New America: The 2012 Election and the Changing Face of Politics, a book about the 2012 presidential election edited by political scientist Larry Sabato. In 2013, he published the blog post "What Does It Mean to Be Privileged," which has since been much praised.

Bouie writes articles focusing on history, public policy, and national politics including the 2016 presidential race. He also writes about entertainment, such as science fiction, comics, and film.

Bouie also has written extensively on racial politics including the Ferguson unrest, the Charleston church shooting, and the subsequent Black Lives Matter movement. Shortly after Donald Trump was elected president in 2016, he wrote an article for Slate arguing that there was "no such thing as a good Trump voter." Several days earlier, he compared Trump voters to the "angry, recalcitrant whites" who pushed back during Reconstruction era after the Civil War. He has criticized the media for an unwillingness to label racism as "racist" (opting instead for terms such as "racial" and "racially charged"). He criticized the media for its "horse-race" coverage of the 2016 election. His writing on racial and national politics subjects is often quoted by other journalists.

Since 2015, Bouie has been a political analyst on CBS News. He has frequently appeared on the network's Sunday morning show Face the Nation, as well as during the network's election night 2016 coverage.

In January 2019, The New York Times announced that Bouie would join their lineup of Opinion columnists.The newspaper stated that (Bouie has) "consistently driven understanding of politics deeper by bringing not only a reporter’s eye but also a historian’s perspective and sense of proportion to bear on the news. His interests, as you will certainly know if you’ve been a reader of his newsletter as well as his columns, range well beyond politics to the visual arts, food and movies."

In 2012, Bouie was chosen for The Root Magazine's Root Top 100. They stated that "his is a strong, influential and necessary voice during the 2012 election season and beyond."

Forbes magazine recognized Bouie in their "30 Under 30 - Media" list in 2015, saying that "he became a leading voice on the Ferguson story."