Race Inquiry Digest (November 1) – Important Current Stories On Race In America

Featured – Charleston to Tree of Life: White nationalism is a threat to us all. Spaces of worship are sadly most vulnerable to white nationalist violence. This weekend we witnessed a sacred place desecrated by violence as 11 people were shot dead at Tree of Life Congregation, the third-oldest synagogue in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Many of us had flashbacks to June 17, 2015, when the nation watched in horror as nine black parishioners and clergy were brutally murdered during a weekly bible study at Mother Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, South Carolina. While separated by over 650 miles, the connection between these incidents is clear. Both were perpetrated by white men infected with the disease of a white supremacist ideology and emboldened by white nationalist propaganda. Rev. Jennifer Bailey and Dove Kent / Salon Read more

Lost in a Week of Hateful Violence, a White Man Killed Two Black Shoppers at a Kentucky Supermarket. Just days before a domestic terrorist entered a Pittsburgh synagogue and shot 11 worshipers dead, a white man gunned down two elderly African-American customers at a Kentucky grocery store Wednesday in what many are calling a hate crime. As the community mourns, we speak with Kentucky Rep. Attica Scott and Reverend Vincent James, chief of community building for the city of Louisville and pastor of Elim Baptist Church. Amy Goodwin / Democracy Now Watch here 

Hate Is on the Ballot Next Week.
All of these hate crimes seem clearly linked to the climate of paranoia and racism deliberately fostered by Donald Trump and his allies in Congress and the media. Killing black people is an old American tradition, but it is experiencing a revival in the Trump era. Paul Krugman / NYT Read more 

We Can Replace Them. Right now America is tearing itself apart as an embittered white conservative minority clings to power, terrified at being swamped by a new multiracial polyglot majority. The divide feels especially stark in Georgia, where the midterm election is a battle between Trumpist reaction and the multicultural America whose emergence the right is trying, at all costs, to forestall. Michelle Goldberg / NYT Read more

Andrew Gillum Is Ready. Is Florida? A profile. The man hoping to be Florida’s first black governor just wants to get to work. Jamil Smith / Rolling Stone Read more

The American social contract. There are things that Americans actually agree on — and polling proves it. Robert Reich / Salon Read more

The Amazing Disappearing Voter. Voter purges have become the right’s new voter suppression tool of choice. “On Election Day, by far the most common problem that voters report when they call in to the national Election Protection Coalition, say civil rights advocates, is some version of an increasingly familiar complaint: ‘I thought I was registered to vote, but I’m not on the list.” Eliza Newlin Carney / Talkingpointsmemo Read more

Decades before Stacey Abrams, these black women risked their lives to register black voters. Annell Ponder, shown here, is one of those fearless black women whose names may not be widely known but whose courage in fighting against voter suppression in Georgia and across the South in the 1960s was nothing short of extraordinary. DaNeen L. Brown / Wash Post Read more

North Dakota Tribes In Race Against Time To Provide New Voter IDs After GOP Law Upheld. Native Americans are scrambling to get IDs with street addresses even if they live where there are no street names. There’s little time before the midterm elections. Mary Papenfuss / HuffPost Read more

I live among the neo-Nazis in eastern Germany. And it’s terrifying. Chemnitz is the tip of an iceberg. Media equivocation and a failure to prosecute hate crimes has made the far right stronger. Anonymous / The Guardian Read more

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