Featured
Tenn. GOP deepens racial tension after expelling Black lawmakers. By Annie Gowen and Hadley Green / Wash Post
Tennessee House Republicans said it was a just a matter of decorum, the need to behave properly in the historic chamber of the state Capitol.
Two newly elected Black lawmakers had disrupted the sanctity of the chamber, Republicans said, when the young legislators yelled into bullhorns and chanted with gun-control advocates during a protest that filled the gallery in the wake of a Christian school shooting last month that left six dead. A White female lawmaker had joined them and the trio — Justin Jones, 27, Justin Pearson, 29, and Gloria Johnson, 60 — quickly became known as the “Tennessee Three.” Read more
Related: The “Tennessee Three” were right: Screw decorum, it’s time to rush the well. By Rae Hodges / Salon
Political / Social
Clarence Thomas Secretly Accepted Luxury Trips From GOP Donor. By Joshua Kaplan, Justin Elliott and Alex Mierjeski / Propublica
Clarence Thomas and the Billionaire
IN LATE JUNE 2019, right after the U.S. Supreme Court released its final opinion of the term, Justice Clarence Thomas boarded a large private jet headed to Indonesia. He and his wife were going on vacation: nine days of island-hopping in a volcanic archipelago on a superyacht staffed by a coterie of attendants and a private chef. If Thomas had chartered the plane and the 162-foot yacht himself, the total cost of the trip could have exceeded $500,000. Fortunately for him, that wasn’t necessary: He was on vacation with real estate magnate and Republican megadonor Harlan Crow, who owned the jet — and the yacht, too. Read more
Related: Who is Harlan Crow? How Clarence Thomas knows the GOP megadonor. By Ken Tran / USA Today
A Mississippi city reeling from a clean water crisis sees a sudden end to trash collection. By and
Residents of Mississippi’s capital are scrambling to figure out what to do with their trash after garbage collection abruptly ended this week as contract negotiations failed between the mayor and the City Council.
The sudden end to trash-hauling services in Jackson is the latest problem to plague the state’s largest city, which is already roiled by gun violence, unpredictable access to clean drinking water and crumbling, pothole-riddled streets. More than a quarter of residents in the state’s predominantly Black capital live in poverty. Many Jacksonians rely on public transportation, or a neighbor’s goodwill for rides, which makes it difficult to bring their trash to a dropoff point. Read more
Efforts to ban critical race theory have been put forth in all but one state – and many threaten schools with a loss of funds. By
Few topics in education have dominated the news over the past few years as much as efforts to ban critical race theory from the nation’s schools. The topic is so pervasive that researchers at the UCLA School of Law Critical Race Studies Program have created a new database to track attempts by local and state government to outlaw the teaching of the theory, which holds, among other things, that racism is not just expressed on an individual level, but rather is deeply embedded in the nation’s laws and policies. The Conversation asked Taifha Natalee Alexander, director and supervisor of the database, about the overarching purpose of the database and what it has shown thus far. Read more
Related: The myth of ‘woke’ indoctrination of students. By Glenn C. Altschuler and David Wippman / The Hill
Black Americans are more likely to be working than white Americans for the first time on record. By Jason Lalljee and Madison Hoff / Business Insider
For the first time since at least 1972, Black Americans are more likely to be employed than their white peers.
That’s according to new job market data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics. The Black employment-population ratio climbed from 59.8% in February to 60.9% in March. The white employment-population ratio climbed from 60.1% in February to 60.2% in March. Read more
The Lasting Impact Of Police Brutality On Black Families. By Juana Summers / NPR Podcast
Caroline Ouko holds a portrait of her son, Irvo Otieno, who died in a state mental hospital on March 6, 2023
Black Americans are killed by police at more than twice the rate of White Americans. And there’s a growing number of Black families who have to live with the pain of losing a loved one at the hands of police. NPR’s Juana Summers speaks with two women who have been living that reality for years. Listen here
In California, ‘Ebony Alerts’ would help find missing Black youth and women. By Jonathan Franklin / NPR
Each year, thousands of Black youth and women go missing across the U.S. at a disproportionate rate. And despite the desperate pleas for media attention, their cases are often overlooked, failing to grab national headlines.
A new bill proposed in California would address that by creating a public alert system similar to those designed to help find abducted children and older adults who’ve gone missing. Senate Bill 673, introduced last week, would create the “Ebony Alert” system for missing Black children and young women. When activated, the proposed system – similar to Amber or Silver alerts — would inform people of missing Black children and young women. Read more
Ethics / Morality / Religion
Easter Reminds Me That Hope Is a Demanding Emotion. By Esau McCaulley / NYT
Easter has never been my favorite church service. Shouting “Alleluia, Christ is risen!” requires an emotional crescendo my melancholy temperament can’t easily manage.
I have never been a big fan of hope. It’s a demanding emotion that insists on changing you. Hope pulls you out of yourself and into the world, forcing you to believe more is possible. Hate is a much less insistent master; it asks you only to loathe. It is quite happy to have you to itself and doesn’t ask you to go anywhere. Read more
Related: A Naïve Reading of the Gospels May Be Just What Christianity Needs. By Ross Douthat / NYT
After biblical protestations, expelled Tennessee lawmakers find support among clergy. By
On Friday, the Poor People’s Campaign announced a clergy-led protest to be held in Nashville later this month.
The last time Tennessee legislators tried to make the Bible the state’s official book, a pastor warned them to be careful what they asked for. Among those sins, according to Justin Jones: Caring more about House decorum than taking any action on gun control legislation in the wake of mass shootings. “They offer superficial treatments for my people’s mortal wounds,” said Jones, reading from the biblical Book of Jeremiah. “They give assurances of peace where there is no peace.” Read more
Asian American Theologian: Our ‘Culture’ Is Not to Blame. By Curtis Yee / Christianity Today
When it comes to the community’s response to trauma and anxiety, Daniel D. Lee calls for a closer look at the dynamics of racism and the migrant experience.
The past several years have seen a sharp rise in violence against Asian Americans. In 2020, the FBI recorded a 73 percent increase in anti-Asian hate crimes. Over the next two years, the Stop AAPI Hate reporting center documented over 11,000 self-reported discriminatory incidents, two-thirds of which were categorized as harassment. Acts of violence against Asian Americans, including a rash of physical assaults in New York City and the 2021 Atlanta spa shooting, have captured the national media. And a recent shooting in Monterey Park, California, by a Chinese American man stirred up similar sentiments of stress and anxiety. Read more
RI window could be first public depiction of Jesus as person of color. By Helena Kelly / Daily Mail
A 147-year-old stained glass window that appears to be depict Jesus as a person of color has been uncovered in a Rhode Island church.
Harvard-trained art historian Hadley Arnold claims to have spotted the image – which is made using brown glass – in the 12-foot windows years after buying St Mark’s church in Warren. The picture had previously gone unnoticed as worshippers did not realize it was supposed to be Jesus. Read more
Historical / Cultural
The American civil war ended on this day. It should be a national holiday. By Steve Phillips / The Guardian
Rather than celebrate this milestone of multiracial democracy, our leaders conspicuously ignore the occasion
Today, April 9, should be a national holiday in the United States, but the wrong people are celebrating. On this day in 1865, Confederate Gen Robert E Lee surrendered to Union forces – marking the effective defeat of the Confederacy and the triumph of those who opposed the idea that this should be a white nationalist nation where Black bodies could be bought and sold on the open market. Yet rather than celebrate this seminal milestone in defending and creating a multiracial democracy, the country’s leaders ignore the occasion, creating a vacuum into which the champions of white nationalism happily goose-step. Read more
Lost graves reveal story of African American church in Williamsburg. By Michael E. Ruane / Wash Post
An aerial view of the excavation site in Williamsburg. Sixty-three graves have been found so far at the site of the vanished First Baptist Church. (Colonial Williamsburg Foundation)
“The individuals buried there [were] part of the community that established the church on Nassau Street,” Gary said. “This is the generation that established the meeting house … and worshiped in that space.” “They’re ours,” said Connie Matthews Harshaw, president of First Baptist Church’s Let Freedom Ring Foundation. These were probably people who worshiped in an early structure that predated the brick church that was built in 1856 and stood on the site until it was purchased and torn down in the 1950s to make way for Colonial Williamsburg. Read more
Inside the Ku Klux Klan’s Plan to Conquer America. By Brooke Leigh Howard / The Daily Beast
Timothy Egan’s book shows how the Klan left the South, and swept in massive waves across the Midwest, with Indiana as the ultimate zone of racist-religious-anti-immigrant terror.
Timothy Egan’s A Fever in the Heartland: The Ku Klux Klan’s Plot to Take Over America, and the Woman Who Stopped Them (Viking) picks up on the second—and more notorious and harrowing—coming of the Ku Klux Klan when white sheets became the costume norm and burning crosses became regular scare tactics. Released April 4, the work of nonfiction reads like a thriller novel, as if it’s laying the groundwork for a movie script rather than providing the textbook template of historical accounts. Read more
Artist Juan de Pareja, who was once enslaved, has been misunderstood for centuries. By Jacqui Palumbo / CNN
In 1650, the city of Rome was abuzz. The Spanish artist Diego Velázquez had just exhibited a portrait in the Pantheon’s domed interior. His subject: Juan de Pareja, an Andalusian man who was enslaved and serving as Velázquez’s studio assistant.
Not only was a formal portrait of a man of African heritage exceedingly rare in Western art at the time, but the painting’s likeness was so stunning that an early biographer of Velázquez wrote the artist sent Pareja around Rome, painting in hand, to show it off to his acquaintances. Pareja became an overnight celebrity. Soon after, he was freed from slavery and became an accomplished artist in his own right in Madrid. But he remains an elusive figure within art history, with details of his life prone to myth, his paintings often misattributed and no more than two of his works ever exhibited in the same place. Read more
Brown Center for the Study of Slavery and Justice Celebrates 10 Years. By Jon Edelman / Diverse Issues in Higher Ed
CSSJ has succeeded beyond expectations, becoming an international leader in the way that slavery and its legacies are taught and understood. Newly re-named for Simmons, it recently celebrated its 10th anniversary and a $10 million endowment.
When Brown University released its landmark 2006 report documenting the institution’s historical involvement in slavery, many of its recommendations were one-time fixes: revising the university’s official history, creating memorials, and the like. Some, however, required longer-term engagement, such as the creation of the Center for the Study of Slavery and Justice (CSSJ), a research hub focusing on the history of slavery and its contemporary impacts. Read more
North Dakota names its first Native American poet laureate. By AP and NPR
Denise Lajimodiere speaks at the Minnesota Children’s Book Festival in Red Wing, Minn., on Sept. 18, 2021. This week, Lajimodiere became the first Native American state poet laureate in North Dakota’s history.
North Dakota lawmakers have appointed a Chippewa woman as the state’s poet laureate, making her the first Native American to hold this position in the state and increasing attention to her expertise on the troubled history of Native American boarding schools. Denise Lajimodiere, a citizen of the Turtle Mountain band of Chippewa Indians in Belcourt, has written several award-winning books of poetry. She’s considered a national expert on the history of Native American boarding schools and wrote an academic book called “Stringing Rosaries” in 2019 on the atrocities experienced by boarding school survivors. Read more
Black Music Sunday: A-tisket, a-tasket, a mix of genres make up this musical Easter basket. By Denise Oliver Velez / Daily Kos
An undated and rare color photo of Ella Fitzgerald.
It’s Easter Sunday, it’s spring, and April is also Jazz Appreciation Month! Lots of things are going on at the same time, so there’s a real mix of music swirling around in my head. Though I no longer believe in bunnies who bring chocolate eggs, I do think fondly of the sweets-filled baskets I received as a kid. As soon as I think about the word “basket,” related to Easter or not, I immediately hear Ella Fitzgerald’s voice in my head, singing her 1938 hit tune “A Tisket, A Tasket,” so that’s where I’m starting today, before I let her lead us to the other music in today’s gift basket. Read more
The school comedy ‘Abbott Elementary’ has Philadelphia teachers talking. By Aubri Juhasz / NPR
Quinta Brunson plays Janine, Abbott Elementary’s plucky protagonist who will stop at nothing to get her students what they need. Brunson, a Philadelphia native, is also the show’s creator.
In the pilot episode of the award-winning sitcom Abbott Elementary, a student pees on a classroom rug. Nicole Wyglendowski has been hooked on the show ever since. “That was brilliant,” says Wyglendowski, a special education teacher in North Philadelphia. “It shows the crazy stuff you don’t think about when you’re like, ‘Oh, I’ll be a teacher someday.'”The show, which is nearing the end of its second season, is set in a fictional Philadelphia public school, not unlike the one Wyglendowski has worked at for the last five years. Read more
Black singles with college education embrace life without marriage. By / The Conversation
Why is it seemingly OK to ask single people “Why are you single?” when married people are rarely asked “Why are you married?”
Sociologist Kris Marsh hopes to break this double-standard with her new book “The Love Jones Cohort: Single and Living Alone in the Black Middle Class.” In it, she examines the lifestyles of single people and explores the stigma that can come with their decision to not marry. Read more
Sports
The Masters were caddied by only Black men for nearly 50 years. By Jack Bantock / CNN
For decades, golfers at The Masters had to use one of Augusta National’s club caddies, such as tournament legend Carl Jackson.
Willie Peterson caddied Nicklaus’ first five victories, while Nathaniel “Iron Man” Avery was on the bag for all four of Palmer’s triumphs. Avery’s headstone was only installed at Augusta’s Southview Cemetery, in Georgia, in 2017, 32 years after his death. Three years later, a 10-minute drive away at Cedar Grove Cemetery, Peterson – who died in 1999 – received his. They were just two of Augusta National’s original caddie corps, all of them Black men who, from the inaugural edition of the tournament in 1934, guided golfers around the fabled course. Read more
Related: Outside the Masters, Black golf in Augusta resides at the Patch. By Farrell Evans / Andscape
Caitlin Clark’s Lesson for White Athletes: Don’t Be a MAGA Pawn. By Dave Zirin / The Nation
When given the lucrative chance to demonize a rival player, Clark chose a different path.
The reason this story is petering out is quite simply that Clark was not willing to play the right wing’s game. In a country where a killer like Kyle Rittenhouse can make a living by showing up for photos ops at closed-door conferences, there is profit in playing to right-wing grievances. But when Clark was asked—repeatedly—whether she wanted an apology from Reese or to have Iowa visit the White House with LSU, her responses gave no quarter to the idea that Reese did anything wrong or that Clark needed support from anyone who thinks she did. “I don’t think Angel should be criticized at all,” said Clark. Read more
The cautionary tales of Kyrie Irving and Ja Morant. By Ken Makin / Andscape
A pair of mercurial point guards embraced at center court recently in Memphis, Tennessee, linked in camaraderie and calamity.
There was the Memphis Grizzlies’ Ja Morant, whose behavior was determined to be detrimental conduct by the NBA, and the Dallas Mavericks’ Kyrie Irving, whose tweet about a book and a movie that repeated antisemitic tropes yielded a multi-game suspension in November 2022. “There was an overload of judgment with Ja, and there was an overload of judgment of what I had going on,” Irving said in postgame comments after their embrace. Read more
Jay-Z’s Roc Nation Calls Out Italian Soccer Fans for Making Racist Monkey Sounds at Black Players. By Noah McGee / The Root
Racism in sports is still alive. Look no further than the Tuesday matchup between Italian soccer clubs Inter Milan and Juventus F.C.
During their matchup, 29-year-old Belgian player Romelu Lukaku, who is Black, was showered with racist chants by fans of Juventus, including monkey noises that could be heard during the broadcast of the match. This led Roc Nation Sports, the agency that reps Lukaku, to take out a full-page advertisement in an Italian newspaper and call out the racism that happened against Lukaku and other Black players in Italy. Read more
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