Race Inquiry Digest (June 26) – Important Current Stories On Race In America

Feature – Sacrificing Black Lives for the American Lie. Americans refuse to see their country as a place where racist politicians and judges maintain laws that form a racist criminal justice system that produces and defends racist cops who disproportionately kill innocent black people. Read more 

Rev. William Barber: Obamacare repeal would be the greatest moral failing since slavery. Rev. William Barber has to stretch deep into the history books to find a historical analogue for the damage Senate Republicans’ health care bill would do to the poor. Read more 

Jeff Sessions’ Ideas About Crime Are Totally Wrong—and the Consequences Can Be Tragic. Sessions hates consent decrees with local police and keeps claiming crime is way up. Evidence doesn’t back him up. Read more  

Supreme Court Case Could Have Huge Impact on Who Wins Future Elections. A high court ruling on gerrymandering has the potential to reshape every area of American politics for generations. Read more 

Study: when it comes to detecting racial inequality, white Christians have a blind spot. They also perceive discrimination against LGBTQ people and immigrants far less than other Americans do. Read more  

The Making of an Antislavery President. Free Kaplan’s new book asks why it took Abraham Lincoln so long to embrace emancipation. Read more 

Tools of Displacement. How Charlottesville, Virginia’s Confederate statues helped decimate the city’s historically successful black communities. Read more 

On Monument Avenue, Richmond will start recognizing its real history. The task before the city, and before other cities across the South, is to stop celebrating a made-up history — one that, as Mr. Stoney said, acts to “lionize the architects and defenders of slavery.” Read more  

The Senate GOP Isn’t Fixing Health Care. It’s Waging Class War. A draft bill released Thursday offers tax cuts to the rich at the expense of the poor and the elderly. Read more 

The Philando Castile jury was stacked with pro-gun, pro-cop, middle-aged white people. There were just two black people, the rest expressed stated support for the police or a belief in the criminal justice system. Here’s how the list shakes out. Read more 

What We Are Teaching Black Children. “Mommy, I’m right here with you.” Those words were  spoken by a 4-year-old girl to her mother, Diamond Reynolds, after both witnessed Philando Castile’s being shot and killed. Read more  

A Noose at the Smithsonian Brings History Back to Life.  A noose is a symbol of the racial violence and terror that African-Americans have confronted throughout American history and of the intensity of resistance we’ve faced to any measure of racial equality. Read more 

‘Marshall’ Brings Thurgood Marshall’s Early Civil Rights Crusade To The Big Screen. See the trailer for the new movie starring Chadwick Boseman. Watch here 

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