Featured
How Democrats can build toward a blowout in 2024 — and vote the GOP into extinction. By Bob Hennelly / Salon
The lesson of 2022: If Democrats focus on core progressive issues that affect people’s lives, anything is possible
Before the empowering implications of the 2022 midterms could be fully appreciated, Donald Trump declared he was running for president and the Republicans won the House by the slimmest of margins. Those GOP gyrations, after the red wave failed to materialize, distracted attention from the historic opportunity that has opened for Democrats to build toward a blowout in 2024 — by building on a platform that for branding purposes we should call the Better Deal for American families.
Looking at the confluence of demographic trends and the statehouse gains in 2022 in key battlegrounds like Pennsylvania and Michigan, it’s possible we can actually take big strides toward voting the GOP into essential extinction by 2024, especially if Donald Trump becomes the Republican presidential nominee. Read more
Political / Social
Trump hosts Kanye West, Nick Fuentes at Mar-a-Lago dinner. By William Steakin and Olivia Rubin / ABC News
Trump met with Ye, who recently lost major business deals over antisemitic comments, and Fuentes, along with Florida Republican political operative Karen Giorno, Giorno confirmed with ABC News. The dinner lasted just under two hours. Fuentes is a white nationalist who has made racist, sexist and antisemitic comments and has been banned on all major social media platforms. A source at the dinner told ABC News that Ye asked Trump to be his vice president during the dinner and that toward the end of the meal the former president “started bad-mouthing Kim Kardashian,” Ye’s ex-wife. Read more
New wave of Hispanic lawmakers to hit House. By Rafael Bernal / The Hill
Democrats will welcome nine new Hispanic representatives from nine different states, a sampling of the voting bloc’s geographic diversity. The GOP will bring in at least four new Hispanics to Congress, also all from different states. They could get a fifth in businessman John Duarte if he is able to hang on to his lead in a California district. Here are the Hispanic newcomers who will be sworn in in January: Read more
Keith Ellison’s Narrow Victory. By William P. Jones / Dissent Magazine
Minnesotans voted to reelect the attorney general who prosecuted Derek Chauvin. The result holds important lessons for the Democratic Party on its approach to criminal justice.
Elected in 2018 on a pledge to be the “People’s Lawyer,” Ellison entered this years’ race with a strong record of protecting worker and consumer rights and leading the successful prosecution of the police officers accused of killing George Floyd and Daunte Wright in 2020. That he won by just 20,000 votes (a fraction of his 100,000 vote margin of victory in 2018) revealed how successfully Republicans narrowed debates over police reform and crime into simplistic narratives about “law and order.” But it also demonstrated that Democrats can win on platforms that deliver racial and economic justice as well as public safety. Read more
Black voters in Louisiana ‘embarrassed’ by state’s failure to pass anti-slavery amendment. By Curtis Bunn / NBC News
“Are they trying to trick us into voting for slavery?” asked John Miles, a 41-year-old Black truck driver in Monroe.
Black voters in Louisiana are confused. Many are embarrassed. Some are angry. All seem to be concerned about how their state is being perceived after a constitutional amendment to eliminate slavery and forced indentured servitude failed to pass in the November election. That may be, in part, because the lawmaker who authored the bill to allow the vote switched direction and worked to kill it. Jordan said he wanted his bill to fail so he could reintroduce it at the next legislative session, in April 2023, with easy-to-understand language. He feared there was potential for a lawmaker to use the confusing language as an opportunity to legalize slavery in Louisiana and keep indentured servitude. Read more
Oldest historically black LCMS church in Mississippi destroyed by arson. By Cheryl Magness / Catholic Reporter
Epiphany Lutheran Church, which traces its beginning to the oldest and only historically black Lutheran Church—Missouri Synod (LCMS) church in Jackson, Miss., burned down in the early morning hours of Nov. 8. The fire was one of seven that were intentionally set in the city, damaging not only Epiphany but Greater Bethlehem Temple Church and several other buildings within a two-mile radius near Jackson State University. Epiphany’s Family Life Center sustained minimal damage and will serve as the congregation’s worship space for the foreseeable future. Read more
Elon Musk Belittles Black Twitter and His Black Employees. By Keith Reed / The Root
What’s undeniable is that as a company, Twitter has been an unmitigated disaster under Elon Musk’s ownership, marked by an explosion in hate speech, celeb defections from the platform, advertiser moratoriums, mass firings, a mass quitting and at least one firing of an exec that Musk initially begged not to quit. And now, weeks into his tenure as “chief twit”, we have an idea of exactly what regard Musk holds Black Twitter and the community of Black staffers inside the company. The Independent reports on a Musk tweet, since deleted, in which he made light of t-shirts that had been created by the company’s “Blackbirds” employee resource group, and mocked the Black Lives Matter movement. Read more
Former surgeon general faces his wife’s cancer — and the ‘Trump Effect.’ By Manuel Roig-Franzia / Wash Post
Jerome Adams and his wife, Lacey, want to tell a personal story about melanoma and cancer prevention. But it is hard to excise the stigma of serving under the former president.
Michelle Obama has a new role. By Nicole Hemmer / CNN
“The Light We Carry” is not a follow-up memoir. It’s a self-help book, one that reflects all the conventions of the genre and shows that Obama understands her appeal: not as a former first lady who has done things few people will ever be able to do, but as a person who has faced familiar challenges despite her unusual circumstances. She has an intuitive sense of how blurred the lines have become between not only the personal and the political, but between influencer and politician. In this book, Obama shows her desire to use that tangle of emotion and power to bring people together, but the ease with which feelings and politics now blend is also a reminder of how easily it that combination could also be used to divide. Read more
Villages’ for the aging coming to more Black communities. By Myah Overstreet / Wash Post
The villages movement started in Boston two decades ago as a way for seniors to find what they need to age in their communities. Nearly 300 have sprouted across the country.
Here’s how some therapists are tackling structural racism in their practice. By Lauren Beard / NPR
Therapy is a predominantly white field in the U.S. — 80% of psychologists, 63% of counselors and 59% of social workers are white, according to Data USA, a website that constructs visualizations of public federal data. Many of the founding ideas, techniques and schools of practice of therapy were developed by white scholars or practitioners. As a result, the field has marginalized the experiences of people of color, therapists and patients say. Microaggressions are also pervasive in psychological practice, researchers note, and many immigrants report not attending therapy because of language barriers, a lack of insurance and high costs. Read more
Disparities in advanced math and science skills begin by kindergarten. By Paul L. Morgan / Salon
Socioeconomic status greatly affects math scores, and this disparity starts in the first years of schooling
Racial and ethnic disparities in advanced math and science skills occur far earlier in the U.S. than previously known. Our new study finds that 13% of white students and 16% of Asian students display advanced math skills by kindergarten. The contrasting percentage for both Black and Hispanic students is 4%.These disparities then continue to occur throughout elementary school. By fifth grade, 13% of white students and 22% of Asian students display advanced math skills. About 2% of Black students and 3% of Hispanic students do so. Similar disparities occur in advanced science skills. What explains these disparities? Factors that consistently explain these disparities include the family’s socioeconomic status — such as parental education and household income — and the student’s own understanding of math, science and reading during kindergarten. Read more
Historical / Cultural
Black Friday Special: Howard Zinn & Voices of a People’s History of the United States. By Amy Goodman / Democracy Now
This year marks 100 years since the birth of the historian Howard Zinn. In 1980, Zinn published his classic work, “A People’s History of the United States.” The book would go on to sell over a million copies and change the way many look at history in America. We begin today’s special with highlights from a production of Howard Zinn’s “Voices of a People’s History of the United States,” where Zinn introduced dramatic readings from history. We hear Alfre Woodard read the words of labor activist Mother Jones and Howard’ son Jeff Zinn read the words of an IWW poet and organizer Arturo Giovannitti. Listen here
Related: Ken Burns’s Long, Hard Look at American History. By Scott Borchert / The New Republic
What does healing look like to survivors of the US Indian boarding school system? By Emily McFarlan Miller / RNS
‘A big aspect of the healing is going to be a sincere, heartfelt apology by the different denominations that participated,’ said one survivor. Shown are students who work in the garden at Chilocco Indian School near Newkirk, Oklahoma, circa 1909. Photo courtesy of NARA/Wikipedia/Creative Commons
Negiel Bigpond remembers being made to stand overnight on a one-foot-square box, his nose pressed to the wall, until morning came and the school day started. A punishment for speaking his Yuchi language. He remembers being made to cut his hair and dress in clothes strange to him. He remembers being put on rations of water and bread or cheese sandwiches. He didn’t like it, but he thought at the time, as a child in the 1960s, that was just the way things were. Only now, in his 70s, looking back at the years he spent at Chilocco Indian School near Newkirk, Oklahoma, does he realize how cruel that was. Read more
The Many Complex Layers of the Monument to Crazy Horse. By Ross Douthat / NYT
Of all the striking monuments you might encounter while driving an overstuffed minivan west across the United States, few leave quite as intense and complex an impression as the Crazy Horse Memorial — the vast unfinished carving of the Oglala Lakota warrior, whose face emerges as an 87-foot-high profile from the side of Thunderhead Mountain in the Black Hills, about 17 miles from Mount Rushmore. Depending on your perspective, it can seem like a monument to persistent American ambition (in its final form it will be one of the largest statues in the world) or a symbol of our national sclerosis (since Rushmore was completed in about a decade and a half and the Crazy Horse Memorial began in 1948 and has no clear completion date). Read more
Related: How testifying for Native Americans made me a witness to history. By Frederick E. Hoxie / Salon
How Ralph Ellison’s World Became Visible. By Arthur Lubow / NYT
Before he became a writer, Ralph Ellison was an emerging photographer. Rarely-seen documentary images, gathered in a forthcoming book, reveal his lifelong engagement with the camera. Show is “Untitled” (New York City), a photograph of men on a Harlem street corner in the 1940s by Ralph Ellison, the author of the 1952 landmark novel, “Invisible Man.”Credit…The Ralph and Fanny Ellison Charitable Trust
Judging the photographs of an artist who is not primarily a photographer raises a prickly question. Are you assessing the photos on their own merits or examining them to better understand the artist’s main work? With an artist like Degas, his photos can be regarded as preparatory sketches for paintings. But what happens when the artist is not a painter but a writer? The book is so searing and vivid that it’s hard to imagine its equivalent in still images. Ellison, who considered a career in photography before finding his vocation as a writer, operated in a different register when he was looking at the world through a viewfinder. Read more
‘Wakanda Forever’ and the importance of #BlackGirlGenius. By Karen Attiah / Wash Post
Actress Letitia Wright arrives for the premiere of Marvel Studios’ “Black Panther: Wakanda Forever” at the Dolby Theatre in Hollywood on Oct. 26 (Valerie Macon/AFP/Getty Images)
The blockbuster hit “Black Panther: Wakanda Forever” is praised for how it deftly addresses the topics of compoundedgrief, generational trauma and the richness of Mesoamerican and African cultures. But I found myself fascinated by the technology in the film and the African women behind it. “Black Panther 2” leans even more into the heroism of Wakanda’s women — and, well, it has to: As it opens, thesuperhero T’Challa has already died of an unspecified illness. But what I was most struck by was how it portrays Black girls and women and technology. It leads us to imagine a world in which Black girls are technological geniuses and the weapons that White men use are, in Gen. Okoye’s words, “so primitive.” Read more
Related: Black Panther 2’s Namor casting opens up Latino colorism debate. By Izzie Ramirez /
Black Music Sunday: Celebrating Jimi Hendrix on his 80th birthday. By Denise Oliver Velez
Many of the musicians I’ve covered here on Black Music Sunday had very long runs, with careers that spanned decades; others died young, and no one knows what they could have accomplished had their stays on the planet been longer. I can’t even begin to imagine what greater heights Jimi Hendrix, whose 80th birthday we’re celebrating here, could have achieved beyond what he did in just a few short years in the music world’s spotlight. Born Johnny Allen Hendrix on Nov. 27, 1942, in Seattle, the man we know as Jimi would join the ancestors on Sept. 18, 1970, at the age of 27. Join me in celebrating his electric guitar genius. Read and listen here
Winners from the 2022 Soul Train Awards Are Revealed. By Shanelle Genai / The Root
On Saturday, the hippest trip awards show in America—a.k.a. the 2022 Soul Train Awards—took place.
Hosted by Deon Cole, the night saw appearances and performances by some of the best of the best in R&B and soul music. And, as is par for the course over on this side of the internet, we’re here to highlight all the Blackity-black goodness that went down! On the winners front, the most awarded recipient of the night went to Beyoncé, who walked away with wins in the categories of Song of the Year (“Break My Soul”), Album of the Year (Renaissance), and Best Collaboration (“Make Me Say It Again, Girl” Ronald Isley & the Isley Brothers feat. Beyoncé). Read more
Pop Hit Maker Irene Cara Dies at 63. Alexander Jane / The Root
It is with heavy hearts that we report the passing of the legendary singer and actress Irene Cara.
Best known for singing the title tracks to eighties pop culture classics “Fame” and Flashdance,” the star reportedly died in her home this week. Cara’s publicist, Judith A. Moose confirmed the news via her Twitter account early Saturday morning. Cara began her rise to fame appearing in the 1970’s children series, “The Electric Company.” Read more
Lizzo Talks ‘Racist Origin’ Of Pop Music And What It’s Like Being A Black Pop Star. Kimberley Richards / HuffPost
“I think that people just have to get used to me,” the “Special” singer said about her style of music.
Lizzo opened up about the stigma she’s faced as a Black pop music artist and how the genre has a “racist origin” in an interview with Entertainment Weekly published on Friday. The “Special” singer talked about how Black artists have been cut off from pop music, and the history of race music or “race records” — music made by Black artists and marketed to Black people in the early 20th century. “Race music was their way of segregating Black artists from being mainstream, because they didn’t want their kids listening to music created by Black and brown people because they said it was demonic and yada, yada, yada,” she told the publication. Read more
Sports
“He is the best shooter in the world right now” — Kyrie Irving has high praise for Yuta Watanabe. By Karan Tyagi / Basketball Network
Yuta Watanabe is quickly turning into one of the best impact players in the NBA, and Kyrie Irving is loving it.
Yuta Watanabe is fast growing to be one of the top discussion topics in the NBA, as the small forward has been shooting immensely well for the Brooklyn Nets this season. He is being used as a rotational player, but the impact that Watanabe has had on the team during trying times has been incredible — he has been highly productive from beyond the arc this season. Read more
How ‘positional segregation’ keeps Black coaches stuck in NFL pipeline. By Tom Schad, Mike Freeman and Steve Berkowitz / USA Today
A USA TODAY analysis of NFL coaching staffs shows how white quarterbacks coaches get fast-tracked, while Black running backs coaches get stuck.
For more than 30 years, NFL teams quietly avoided hiring Black assistants to coach certain position groups, mostly those in the middle of the field like quarterback or the offensive line. The belief among white coaches and owners, while often unspoken, was that those positions required intelligence. And Black coaches weren’t smart enough. “This is unfortunately part of our league’s history,” said Hall of Fame coach Tony Dungy, who got his first assistant coaching job in 1981. In some ways, history hasn’t changed. Nearly two decades after the implementation of the Rooney Rule, USA TODAY Sports compiled and analyzed demographic information for all 722 on-field coaches in the NFL at the start of this season. Read more
Jerry Jones fields questions about 1957 photo published in report. By Todd Archer / ESPN
The Post published a story Wednesday with a photo that showed a 14-year-old Jones peering over a crowd of white students as six Black teenagers walked up the steps of North Little Rock High School in Arkansas as the school was integrated in 1957. Jones said he was there out of curiosity than animosity. “I didn’t know at the time the monumental event really that was going on,” Jones said. “I’m sure glad that we’re a long way from that. I am. That would remind me [to] just continue to do everything we can to not have those kinds of things happen.” Read more
Site Information
Articles appearing in the Digest are archived on our home page. And at the top of this page register your email to receive notification of new editions of Race Inquiry Digest.
Click here for earlier Digests. The site is searchable by name or topic. See “search” at the top of this page.
About Race Inquiry and Race Inquiry Digest. The Digest is published on Mondays and Thursdays.
Use the customized buttons below to share the Digest in an email, or post to your Facebook, Linkedin or Twitter accounts.