Featured

Viktor Orbán laid out his dark worldview to the American right — and they loved it. By Zack Beauchamp / Vox

The European Union’s only autocrat came to CPAC Dallas and sold American conservatives on a vision of a Western civil war

About two weeks ago, Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán gave a speech in which he declared “we do not want to become peoples of mixed-race.” On Thursday afternoon, he gave the opening speech at the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) in Dallas, a bookend to former President Donald Trump’s closing address this weekend at the influential right-wing gathering. Read more

Political / Social

The Republican Party Is the Anti-Democracy Party. By Charles M. Blow / NYT

The word “democracy” never appears in the Declaration of Independence or the Constitution. However, democracy is central to the modern concept of America. The founders seemed to prefer calling the burgeoning country a Republic rather than a democracy. Many were opposed to direct democracy and the possibility that demagogues could corrupt it or mob rule could overtake it. They instead designed a representative government in which “the people” would elect representatives who would make the laws and conduct the governance. The problem, or course, was that their definition of “the people” was largely limited to wealthy white men, enslavers among them. Read more

Federal Officials Charge Four Officers in Breonna Taylor Raid. By Nicholas Bogel-Burroughs / NYT

The police in Louisville, Ky., fatally shot Ms. Taylor during a nighttime raid on her apartment. Prosecutors said officers had lied in order to obtain a search warrant for Ms. Taylor’s home.

More than two years after police officers killed Breonna Taylor during a late-night raid of her apartment in Louisville, Ky., the Justice Department announced a series of federal charges on Thursday against four of the officers involved in the operation that set off racial justice protests across the country. Read more

Researchers Did a Deep Dive Into Efforts to Restrict Critical Race Theory. Here’s What They Found. By Sylvia Goodman / Chronicle of Higher Education

Since Republican lawmakers began backing bills to limit diversity training or ban the teaching of “divisive” topics, most national news coverage has focused on such efforts in red states. But a new analysis reveals that restrictions like these have popped up in nearly every state, with local governments and school boards taking matters into their own hands when the state doesn’t act against critical race theory. Read more

Experts Say Student Debt Forgiveness Will Help Black Women. By Derek Major / Black Enterprise

According to the Education Trust, Black women owe an average student debt of $38,000 after earning a bachelor’s degree and $52,000 after earning a graduate degree. Additionally, Education Trust says that 12 years after starting college, Black women typically owe 113% of their student loans while every other demographic can pay off some portion of what they owe. Victoria Jackson, assistant director of higher education policy at Education Trust, said Black women “shoulder the greatest burden from the high cost of college.” “We have fewer resources because of racism and sexism — gender and wealth pay gaps are well documented,” Jackson told Diverse Education. Read more

Racial Disparities in Monkeypox Outbreak Go Unmentioned in Press Call. By Margo Snipe / Capital B

Black Americans made up 12% of new monkeypox cases in late May. By mid-July, the proportion had jumped to 31%.

The Biden administration declared monkeypox a public health emergency on Thursday, but during the 40-minute media call for that announcement, federal officials never mentioned the virus’s disproportionate impact on Black Americans. It’s an absence that harks back to the first weeks of the coronavirus when, in the spring of 2020, Black people were dying at exceptional rates with little acknowledgement from government leaders. As monkeypox cases topped 7,100 nationwide this week, data from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention showed that Black Americans — along with Hispanic Americans — are bearing the brunt of the outbreak. More than a quarter of monkeypox cases in the U.S. have infected Black people — double the rate expected given their population. Read more

In Harvard admissions case, will justices cherry-pick their history? By Ruth Marcus / Wash Post

If you thought the Supreme Court term that just concluded was a disaster, brace yourself for the next one. The conservative justices will shift their focus to another long-standing goal: outlawing affirmative action in higher education. The outcome in two cases before the court, challenging admissions programs at Harvard University and the University of North Carolina, appears even more assured than was the overturning of Roe v. Wade. The conservative justices, who have long bristled at anything that smacks of a racial preference, seem poised to overturn decades of precedent letting colleges and universities consider racial diversity as a factor when admitting students. Read more

Albert Woodfox, who spent nearly 44 years in solitary confinement, dies. By Shauneen Miranda / NPR

Albert Woodfox, who spent nearly 44 years in solitary confinement — thought to be the longest in U.S. history — died Thursday from coronavirus-related complications, according to his family. He was 75. In 1965, Woodfox was incarcerated at the Louisiana State Penitentiary on armed robbery charges. Woodfox and the late Herman Wallace were convicted of the 1972 murder of Brent Miller, a corrections officer, but had long maintained their innocence. His conviction for Miller’s murder was overturned multiple times throughout his time in solitary confinement. Woodfox was set free on his 69th birthday in 2016 after a plea deal to lesser charges. Read more

Ethics / Morality / Religion

What’s God Got to Do With It? The Rise of Christian Nationalism in American Politics. By Jane Coaston / The Arguement Podcast

Christian nationalism has been empowered in American politics since the rise of Donald Trump. From “Stop the Steal” to the storming of the U.S. Capitol and now, the overturn of Roe v. Wade — Christian nationalist rhetoric has undergirded it all. But given that a majority of Americans identify as Christian, faith also isn’t going anywhere in our politics. So what would a better relationship between church and state look like? To discuss, Jane Coaston brings together two people who are at the heart of the Christian nationalism debate. Listen here

The Christian Right Fires A Warning Shot At Senate Republicans. By Sarah Posner / TPM

After passing the House with the support of 47 Republicans, the Respect for Marriage Act, which would protect marriage rights for same-sex couples if the Supreme Court were to overturn its 2015 decision in Obergefell v. Hodges, faces much dimmer prospects in the Senate. There is one reason why: the Christian right still controls the Republican Party. Movement leaders know it took 50 years to reverse Roe, and are committed to a similar strategy to undermine and eventually overturn Obergefell. With abundant clues in the Supreme Court’s June decision overturning Roe that LGBTQ rights could be next on the chopping block, it is unimaginable that movement leaders would sink that goal by allowing this bill to become law. Read more

Black Catholic groups gather for first in-person joint meeting in two years. By Dan Stockman / Global Sisters Report

Sr. Addie Lorraine Walker of the School Sisters of Notre Dame speaks July 27 to members of the National Black Sisters’ Conference, which gathered July 23-28 at the University of Notre Dame. Walker was elected president of the group at the meeting. At right is outgoing president Sr. Josita Colbert.

The new president of the National Black Sisters’ Conference closed the group’s annual gathering with a rousing, passionate call for Black sisters, clergy, deacons and seminarians to stand with her as a witness that Black lives do matter. Sr. Addie Lorraine Walker of the School Sisters of Notre Dame was elected to lead the 54-year-old conference at the group’s joint meeting with three other Black Catholic groups and also received the conference’s Harriet Tubman Award, which honors inspirational leaders. In her remarks accepting the award on the gathering’s final evening July 27, she returned repeatedly to one of the conference’s themes: “Sawabona,” a South African greeting meaning “I see you.” Read more

Historical / Cultural

History Refocused. A new lens on America’s past. By Cassie Spodak, Channon Hodge and Margaret Dawson / CNN

These are the surprising and personal stories, lost and hidden in America’s past, hosted by CNN’s Abby Phillip, Suzanne Malveaux, Omar Jimenez, Athena Jones, Ryan Young, John Avlon and more. Knowing these stories might reshape your understanding of the disparities the country faces today. Listen and read here.

Schools banned books about Black life. Black kids are reading anyway. By Tat Bellamy-Walker / NBC News

Some Black students are launching book clubs and organizing protests to defend books that have been targeted in a national battle against critical race theory.

Christina and Renee Ellis, students at Central York High School, a predominantly white school in Pennsylvania, helped reverse a book ban targeting the work of Black authors. For about a month, the sisters and several of their classmates in the Panther Anti-Racist Union, a student-led racial and social justice advocacy group, protested the challenge after an all-white school board banned diverse educational materials, including a book about Rosa Parks; “Hidden Figures,” a story about Black female mathematicians; and the documentary “I Am Not Your Negro,” about the author and cultural critic James Baldwin. Read more

Ivy League university set to rebury skulls of Black people kept for centuries. By Ed Pilkington / The Guardian

University of Pennsylvania houses remains at Penn Museum, where they form a collection once used to justify white supremacy

The University of Pennsylvania is moving ahead with the reburial of the cranial remains of at least 13 Black Philadelphians whose skulls have been kept for almost two centuries in a notorious anthropological collection used to justify white supremacy in the run-up to the US civil war. The Ivy League university is petitioning the Philadelphia orphans’ court for permission to rebury the skulls in the city’s historic African American Eden cemetery. Should the ceremony go ahead, it would amount to one of the most significant restorative processes for Black remains in America in the wake of the racial reckoning following the 2020 Black Lives Matter protests. Read more

Reproductive Justice and Black Women’s Activism. By Tiana U. Wilson / AAIHS

In September 1986, former Third World Women’s Alliance (TWWA) member and pediatrician Melanie Tervalon spoke to an audience about the history of racism in the United States and how it shaped Black women’s perspective on the abortion rights movement. Differing from mainstream white feminists’ advocacy of reproductive rights, Black women organizers called for a more expansive definition of bodily autonomy that extended beyond access to safe abortion and contraceptives. Read more

Unsolved murders and the mothers of Jackson, Mississippi. By Jim Axelrod and Andrew Bast / CBS News

After Margie Allen’s son Ryan was murdered on Thanksgiving in 2020, she said police in Jackson, Mississippi left it up to her to find clues. “I was shown a picture of my baby on the side of the road. I was shown some information. And I was told to go solve my own crime,” Allen said. Mothers facing the prospect of investigating their own child’s murder has become a reality in Jackson, where a homicide squad of eight detectives responded to 156 homicides last year. Jackson suffers from one of the highest murder rates in the country, and roughly four in 10 of those killings went unsolved. Read more

Angelina Jolie’s daughter Zahara is headed to Spelman College. By Lisa Respers France / CNN

Angelina Jolie’s daughter is headed to an HBCU. Zahara Jolie-Pitt will be attending Spelman College in Atlanta, her mother shared over the weekend. Spelman is a historically Black liberal arts college for women that has several notable alumnae including Pulitzer Prize-winning author Alice Walker and “The Cosby Show” star Keshia Knight Pulliam. The campus of Morehouse College for men is in close proximity to Spelman. The nickname “SpelHouse” was coined to identify their closeness and common events. Read more

Sports

Brittney Griner sentenced to 9 years on drug charges in Russian court. By Charles Maynes, Bill Chappell and Rachel Treisman / NPR

A Russian court has found Brittney Griner guilty on drug smuggling and possession charges. The widely expected verdict comes after a monthlong trial and nearly six months after the basketball star was arrested at a Moscow-area airport with cannabis vape cartridges in her luggage. The judge sentenced Griner to nine years in prison. Her charges carried up to 10 years, and the Russian prosecution had requested a sentence of nine years and six months in a penal colony. Read more

Processing Deshaun Watson — past, present and future. By Martenzie Johnson / Andscape

Where do we go after the Browns quarterback received a six-game suspension for violating the league’s personal conduct policy?

And now I, and many others, have to examine why we thought so highly of Watson in the first place. What was it about him that made him trustworthy? Was it because he was a Black quarterback? Was it because he was a likable Black quarterback? Read more

Keyshawn Johnson Wants the N.F.L. to Remember Its ‘Forgotten Four.’ By Ken Belson / NYT

The former Pro Bowl receiver lobbied Pro Football’s Hall of Fame to honor Kenny Washington, Woody Strode, Bill Willis and Marion Motley, the four Black players who reintegrated the league in 1946.

Keyshawn Johnson’s history lesson began with a question. In 2020, Bob Glauber, a Newsday reporter, wanted to write a book about Kenny Washington and Woody Strode, whose signings to the Los Angeles Rams in 1946 broke an effective ban on Black players in the N.F.L. Yet Johnson said he had no idea of their importance as two of the four Black players to break the N.F.L.’s color barrier. He did not even know that N.F.L. owners had struck a gentlemen’s agreement to not sign Black players that lasted from 1934 to 1946. The ban, Johnson learned, was only broken after businessmen and journalists in Los Angeles pressured the Rams into signing Washington and Strode in 1946. Bill Willis and Marion Motley joined the Cleveland Browns the same year. Read more

Jemele Hill opens up about leaving ESPN’s ‘conservative culture.’ By Cydney Henderson / USA Today

Jemele Hill is getting candid about the “conservative culture” at ESPN that led to her contentious departure following an infamous tweet about ex-President Donald Trump. “I wasn’t a good fit for the ‘SportsCenter’ culture. Definitely not a good fit for the management that was overseeing ‘SportsCenter’ at the time. And I got tired. I got really tired of fighting everyday to be myself,” Hill said Thursday on Kenny Mayne’s podcast, “Hey Mayne.” Hill, 46, joined ESPN as a columnist in 2006. She began co-hosting the “His & Hers” podcast with Michael Smith in 2011. The popular podcast went on to become a ESPN2 show in 2013. Hill and Smith were promoted to evening anchors of “SportsCenter” in February 2017. Read more

Tennis has become an outlet for Black people during the pandemic. By Andscape Staff / Andscape

The USTA recently announced the results of a study that showed participation in the sport among Black/African American players grew from 1.6 million in 2019 to 2.3 million in 2021, an increase of 43.75%. What drove the increase, according to the results that came from data provided by Sports Marketing Surveys? The drive by the USTA to find ways to increase tennis participation across the country that, in many areas, was under a lockdown. Tennis became a safe outlet. Read more

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Important Current Stories On Race In America

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