Race Inquiry Digest (August 14) – Important Current Stories On Race In America

Feature – Charlottesville and the Bigotocracy. The late, great Gore Vidal said that we live in “The United States of Amnesia.” Our fatal forgetfulness flares when white bigots come out of their closets, emboldened by the tacit cover they’re given by our president. We cannot pretend that the ugly bigotry unleashed in the streets of Charlottesville, Va., this weekend has nothing to do with the election of Donald Trump. Read more 

White Supremacy in the Age of Trump. Never forget that this country has a long history of upper-class whites using racism to their advantage. Read more 

This weekend’s Charlottesville rally represents an alliance between pro-Confederates and Nazis. The latest alt-right rally over a Confederate statue represents a terrifying resurgence of Nazi rhetoric. Read more 

Rev. Barber: Trumpvangelicals are using faith to bring us to the brink of nuclear war. When the Rev. Robert Jeffress declared this week that “God has given Trump authority to take out Kim Jong Un,” many who grew up in Sunday School struggled to square the teaching of the president’s favorite pastor with the words of Jesus. Read more 

When Privatization Means Segregation: Setting the Record Straight on School Vouchers. In recent weeks, private school vouchers has taken center stage in debates over the future of American education. Policy proposals to use public funds for private school tuition vouchers have a long history, dating back to a seminal 1955 essay by Milton Friedman. Read more 

Sorry, Mr. President: White people are not oppressed in America. Steve Bannon, Michael Anton, Sebastian Gorka, and Stephen Miller are Trump’s songwriters and band members. Over the last few weeks Trump has played an arena-scale concert where the unifying themes of his music are racism, bigotry, nativism and prejudice. Read more 

The Old Adage: When white folks get a cold, black folks get pneumonia. The issue of climate change and the potential for disproportionate effects on poor and disadvantaged minorities is cause for concern. Watch the official trailer for, An inconvenient Sequel : Truth to Power (2017) – Al Gore Movie.    

Who’s benefiting from affirmative action? White men. So now men enjoy affirmative action, vis-à-vis women. And most of the recipients of this assistance are whites, who also receive an advantage when competing head-to-head with Asians. Read more 

Stanford University course to study ‘abolishing whiteness.’  Stanford University is slated to offer a class this fall called “White Identity Politics,” during which students will “survey the field of whiteness studies” and discuss the “possibilities of … abolishing whiteness,” according to the course description. Read more 

Why Are Police Officers More Dangerous Than Airplanes?  After an airplane plummets into a cornfield or a swamp, the National Transportation Safety Board sends a “go team” to interview survivors and pick through the debris for evidence of mechanical failures. Mr. Bell is calling for an agency like the National Transportation Safety Board to do the same thing for police procedures that end in violence. Read more 

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