Featured
A Black girl won the first national spelling bee, dealing a blow to racism. By Bill Chappell / NPR
Marie C. Bolden made national headlines when she turned in a flawless performance at a spelling bee in Cleveland. Her competitors included white students from segregated school districts in the South. Courtesy the Brown Family
If you haven’t heard about the Black girl who won the first national spelling bee in the U.S. 115 years ago, you’re not alone: even many in her family didn’t know about Marie C. Bolden’s feat until after she died, decades later. “It’s astounding to me” that she never talked about winning a gold medal in front of thousands of people, Bolden’s grandson, Mark Brown, told NPR.
But back in 1908, Bolden’s victory made national news and upended racist stereotypes, less than 50 years after the Civil War. The 14-year-old did it by being perfect, spelling 500 words flawlessly to lead her hometown team, Cleveland, Ohio, to victory in the city’s then-new Hippodrome Theater. “She never talked about this award, this amazing accomplishment,” Brown said. “But even Booker T. Washington mentioned [it] in his speeches.” Read more
Political / Social
The Problem With Wealth-Based Affirmative Action. By Richard Rothstein / The Atlantic
It’s not an adequate substitute for race-based programs.
Any day now, the Supreme Court could strike down race-based affirmative action in college admissions—an outcome that would represent a dramatic setback for racial equality in the United States. What should schools do in response? Some advocates have proposed giving preference to applicants with low socioeconomic status, regardless of race—for example, students whose parents have low levels of wealth. Because African Americans tend to have less wealth than white Americans, the thinking goes, wealth-based affirmative action would still give a boost to Black students.
But wealth-based preferences are not an adequate substitute for race-based affirmative action. Not only will they fail to achieve the level of Black student enrollment that proponents promise; they also will exclude deserving middle-class Black students. And they won’t account for the historical harms that made affirmative action necessary in the first place. Read more
Related: Let’s Smash the College Admissions Process. By David Brooks / NYT
‘Woke’ is the opposite of whiteness. By Michael Harriot / The Grio
The people who co-opted, redefined and weaponized the 80-year-old Black expression have finally settled on a concise, standardized definition for “woke.”
Finally, someone has offered an apt explanation for the political and social movement that has enraptured America. In a mere 10 words, this impromptu linguist managed to provide future generations with a concise translation of a phrase whose meaning has eluded us for months. This hate-spewing race warrior explained the world of whiteness. Let us marvel at its white excellence once more: “And I thought personally, there was too much Black history.” This is the definition of “woke.” Read more
Related: How Chick-fil-A became a target for going ‘woke.’ By Jordan Valinsky / CNN
Related: VMI’s chief diversity officer resigns amid alumni war over DEI. By Ian Shapiro / Wash Post
Florida businesses plans strike to protest DeSantis immigration law. By Ana Goni-Lessan and John Kennedy / Tallahassee Democrat
Protests took place across six Florida cities while some businesses across the state shut their doors Thursday in opposition to a tough, new immigration law pushed by Gov. Ron DeSantis, who is campaigning this week in Iowa and New Hampshire.
DeSantis last week formally announced his bid for the Republican presidential nomination. But just a couple of weeks earlier, he signed into law the sweeping crackdown on undocumented immigrants that is the subject of the protests. “I’m trying to support all of the immigrant people,” said Victor Prado, general manager of El Mariachi restaurant in West Palm Beach, which was closed Thursday. “They come to this country to get a better life. We left everyone in our country to come to this beautiful country to live better.” Read more
Related: Who Ron DeSantis should fear — and why it isn’t Donald Trump. By Chauncey Devega / Salon
Talk of Racism Proves Thorny for G.O.P. Candidates of Color. Jonathan Weisman and / NYT
As candidates like Tim Scott and Nikki Haley bolster their biographies with stories of discrimination, they have often denied the existence of systemic racism in America while describing situations that sound just like it.
“I’m living proof that America is the land of opportunity and not a land of oppression,” Mr. Scott says in a new campaign advertisement running in Iowa, though he has spoken of his grandfather’s forced illiteracy and his own experiences being pulled over by the police seven times in one year “for driving a new car.” Read more
32 Mississippi school districts still under federal desegregation orders. By AP and NBC News
The desegregation orders fit into a broader body of civil rights work that is examining jails, police departments and hate crimes in the state, according to the Justice Department. Shown is Kristen Clarke, the assistant attorney general in charge of the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division.
Enforcing the open desegregation orders fit into a broader body of civil rights work launched in Mississippi that is examining jails, police departments and hate crimes in the state, according to Assistant Attorney General Kristen Clarke of the U.S. Department of Justice’s Civil Rights Division. Referring to the U.S. Supreme Court decision that outlawed segregation of public schools across the country, she said the Justice Department is ensuring school districts provide Black students in Mississippi with equal access to education programs. Read more
Related: Mississippi Is Offering Lessons for America on Education. By Nicholas Kristof / NYT
States are Silencing the Will of Millions of Voters. The Editorial Board / NYT
Gov. Greg Abbott, Republican of Texas, is expected to sign a bill in the next few days that would make it immeasurably more difficult for cities in the state to govern themselves. The bill would strip cities of the ability to set standards for local workplaces, to ensure civil rights, and to improve their environments, trampling on the rights of voters who elected local officials to do just that.
By reducing the right of localities to make their own decisions, Texas has joined dozens of other states that have asserted their dominance over cities in recent years through a practice known as state pre-emption. Read more
Related: Race once governed U.S. voting patterns. That’s quickly changing. By Henry Olsen / Wash Post
Chicago’s New Mayor Could Signal a Pro-Public Education Shift. By Michaela Brant / The Progressive
Brandon Johnson is bringing his public school teacher bonafides to the job of overseeing the nation’s fourth-largest school district.
The system faces declining enrollment, underfunding, and the city-wide question of how to keep young people out of trouble without preemptively criminalizing them. Johnson pledged to invest heavily in neighborhood schools and the communities surrounding them—unlike his former opponent and charter school proponent Paul Vallas. Read more
NAACP President Derrick Johnson Warns Against New Debt Ceiling Bill. By Lauren Nutall / Black Enterprise
On June 1, the Senate approved a bill raising the debt ceiling and preventing the country from defaulting on payments. However, the NAACP has condemned this bill, citing its disproportionately negative impact on Black Americans, according to The Hill.
NAACP President and CEO Derrick Johnson released an official statement on June 2, encouraging lawmakers to consider ending the debt ceiling entirely. “This debt ceiling bill will ensure the country avoids defaulting on our financial obligations but it reflects misplaced priorities,” says Johnson. He continues, alleging that conservative legislators are centering corporations and wealthy individuals while neglecting Americans who seek public assistance. Read more
Related: Republicans Have a Twisted View of the Safety Net. By Jamelle Bouie / NYT
What Happened When a Brooklyn Neighborhood Policed Itself for Five Days. By Maria Cramer / NYT
On a two-block stretch of Brownsville in April, the police stepped aside and let residents respond to 911 calls. It was a bold experiment that some believe could redefine law-enforcement in New York City.
It had been a quiet April afternoon until about a dozen teenagers began running up Pitkin Avenue in Brownsville, yelling and cursing. They were chasing a girl of about 14 and it was clear they wanted a fight. Five plainclothes police officers watched warily. Across Pitkin stood about half a dozen men, civilians in jeans and purple-and-gray sweatshirts. “They got it,” an officer said. The teenagers slowed as they spotted the men, workers from an organization called Brownsville In Violence Out, who calmly waved them in different directions. They scattered as the girl fled down a side street. Read more
White Women Must Do More To Confront Racism. By Saira Rao and Regina Jackson / Time
In 2019, we decided to host anti-racism events in white women’s dining rooms for one specific reason: To turn the age-old adage, “it’s rude to talk about politics at the dinner table” on its head.
This is what we’ve learned—if you don’t talk about racism, you can’t dismantle it. But it isn’t just over the dinner table that this “niceness” rules. In the aftermath of George Floyd’s murder in 2020, you were eager, frenzied even, to do this work. A mere two years later, not only is that excitement for anti-racism work gone, the pendulum has swung in the other direction, into a verifiable whitelash against anti-racism work. If white womanhood is a house, your need to be perfect is the foundation. It is this need for perfection that makes it impossible to engage in antiracism work. Being perfect is the key to your happiness, to your success, to your very existence. Read more
The differences between race and ethnicity – and why they’re so hard to define. By Harmeet Kaur / CNN
Put another way, race and ethnicity are social and political constructs. Still, they carry enormous consequences in the US, Jiménez and other scholars say. Here’s how to make sense of them. In US parlance, race refers to a group of people who share physical traits – such as skin color, hair texture or eye shape – based on some common ancestry. That common ancestry is broadly related to geography, said Grace Kao, a professor of sociology at Yale University. (For example, White people can generally trace their roots back to Europe, while Black people can generally trace their roots to Africa.) Ethnicity, meanwhile, refers to a group of people who share a common history and culture. It sometimes (but not always) correlates to national origin – for example, a person might be categorized as racially Asian and ethnically Chinese. Read more
Ethics / Morality / Religion
‘Lincoln’s God’ holds magnifying glass to Civil War president’s faith. By Tom Deignan / NCR
Lincoln’s God: How Faith Transformed a President and a Nation
In his thoughtful new book, Lincoln’s God: How Faith Transformed a President and a Nation, Joshua Zeitz writes a compelling chronicle of Lincoln’s evolving relationship to faith against a backdrop of events that influenced the Great Emancipator as much as he influenced them. Such a portrait of young Lincoln in particular, who “studiously avoided mixing religion and politics,” is timely and provocative — at least for readers willing to engage in the kind of earnest reflection to which the former president was so dedicated. Read more
Utah School District Bans the Bible for “Vulgarity” and “Violence.” By Tori Otten / The New Republic
The book was banned after a complaint that highlighted how easy it is to get books banned in schools now, thanks to Utah law.
A Utah school district has banned the Bible for younger students after someone complained that it contained too much sexual content—in an interesting twist on the book bans sweeping the country. Utah passed a controversial law last year intended to remove “sensitive material” from school libraries and classrooms. The law defines “sensitive material” as subjects that are pornographic or indecent. Anyone can request that a book can be reviewed by a committee for propriety. School librarians and teachers saw a huge spike in review requests after the law was passed, mainly for books that dealt with racial justice, gender ideology, and LGBTQ representation. Read more
Inside the Christian Legal Crusade to Revive School Prayer. By Linda K. Wertheimer / The New Republic
Buoyed by the right-wing Supreme Court, Christian groups are laying the groundwork for public schools to veer back toward the 1960s.
In Bossier Parish schools, parents, teachers, and students told me, the court order stalled, but didn’t entirely stop, Christian prayer. Now, with a Supreme Court friendly to school prayer, educators and state lawmakers around the country are testing the limits of the strict separation of church and state written into the Constitution. In a handful of states, including Kentucky, Montana, and Texas, lawmakers have recently proposed or passed measures attempting to promote faith in schools. Read more
Evangelicals Are Trump’s Firewall Against Primary Losses. By Ed Kilgore / New York Magazine
Attendees raise their hands as they worship inside the tent during the ReAwaken America tour at Cornerstone Church, in Batavia, N.Y., on August 12, 2022. Photo: AP Photo/Carolyn Kaster/AP
Everyone covering Republican presidential politics knows how important a force conservative Evangelical Christians are in that party, particularly in such crucial precincts as the first-in-the-nation Iowa caucuses. So it has become routine to examine GOP politicians for their adherence to various issue positions of presumed significance to these voters, and to their pulpit-based leaders, who collectively used to be known as the Christian right. Read more
Historical / Cultural
Fort Bragg becomes Fort Liberty in Army’s most prominent move to erase Confederate names from bases. By Hannah Schoebaum / AP
Fort Bragg shed its Confederate namesake Friday to become Fort Liberty in a ceremony some veterans said was a small but important step in making the U.S. Army more welcoming to current and prospective Black service members.
The change was the most prominent in a broad Department of Defense initiative, motivated by the 2020 George Floyd protests, to rename military installations that had been named after confederate soldiers. “We were given a mission, we accomplished that mission and we made ourselves better,” Lt. Gen. Christopher Donahue, the commanding general of the XVIII Airborne Corps and Fort Liberty, told reporters after the ceremony that made the name change official. Read more
Descendants of early Black Californians want their ancestors’ stolen land back. By Curtis Bunn / NBC News
Yolanda Tylu Owens’ ancestor Edward Hatton owned land in Napa, California, America’s best known wine-growing region, replete with its symbols of wealth and beauty. Marissa Leshnov for NBC News
Former slaves who came to California mined for gold and bought property, only for their land to be stolen or seized. Their families, generations later, say it’s time for a reckoning. It had been nine months since Yolanda Tylu Owens unearthed her ancestors’ history by researching her family tree. But one evening, quietly sitting at the foot of her bed in her home in Sacramento, California, an idea flashed in her mind. “It was like my ancestors spoke to me,” Owens said. “It was so out of the blue. But it was clear: I should search to see if my great-great-great-grandfather had any land.” Read more
When Black Liberation Is the Family Business. By Michael P. Jeffries / NYT
The Black Panthers office in Harlem, circa 1970. A new book recounts the lives of several party members, including Lumumba and Afeni Shakur.Credit…Michael Ochs Archives/Getty Images
In 1994, Tupac Shakur gave a stirring interview to MTV about his career and penchant for controversy. Shakur grew up poor and embedded in a Black revolutionary family. He was not always angry, but he insisted Black rage was logical: America exploited and persecuted Black people, extracting talented survivors like him from the ghetto, and condemning those left behind to violence and early death. Santi Elijah Holley’s “An Amerikan Family” is subtitled “The Shakurs and the Nation They Created.” In the introduction, Holley implies that the nation he refers to is America, a country resigned to suffering and shame until racism is eradicated. Read more
Greta Lee of ‘Past Lives’ says truthful storytelling means not serving the white male gaze. By Kimmy Yam / NBC News
The film offers “such a radical way to see an Asian American woman through a tremendous amount of cultural specificity,” Lee says.
By doing away with any archetypes in romantic dynamics, A24’s new film “Past Lives” makes way for a universal love story about fate and a longing for the past, says Greta Lee, who plays the main character, Nora. The film, which opens to a limited release Friday, involves Nora’s bond with her Korean childhood best friend, Hae Sung, played by Teo Yoo, while she is married to an understanding husband, Arthur, played by John Magaro. And the men are not in contention with each other. Read more
Black Music Sunday: Kicking off Black Music Month with Oliver Nelson. By Demise Oliver Velez / Daily Kos
Black Music Month, known today as African American Music Appreciation Month, started on June 1. Former President Jimmy Carter, who is a major jazz fan, kicked off the process in 1979, which didn’t become official until Bill Clinton issued a proclamation in 2000.
Today is also the birthday of Oliver Nelson, one of our greatest musicians who inhabited so many roles: jazz composer, arranger, bandleader, saxophonist, and clarinetist. June is also LGBTQ+ Pride Month, and I’d like to introduce you to the compilation album “Stolen Moments: Red Hot + Cool,” named for Nelson’s jazz standard “Stolen Moments” and its accompanying film, which served to focus attention on the HIV/AIDS epidemic in the Black community. Read more and listen here
Bill Cosby is facing a new sexual assault lawsuit. By Manuel Roig-Franzia / Wash Post
Victoria Valentino, pictured at her home in Altadena, Calif., in 2014, has filed a civil suit against Bill Cosby, claiming he drugged and raped her in 1969. (Marvin Joseph/The Washington Post)
A former Playboy centerfold model who says she was drugged and raped more than five decades ago by Bill Cosby has filed a lawsuit against the legendary entertainer under a new California law that temporarily lifts the statute of limitations on civil sexual-assault cases. “It’s not about money, it’s about accountability,” Valentino, 80, told The Washington Post in her first interview about the case shortly before the suit was filed. “Rape steals something from you that cannot be repaired or restored.” Read more
Sports
What’s Next For Shannon Sharpe After His Breakup With Skip? By Shannon Dawson / Newsone
After June, fans will no longer see Shannon Sharpe on Fox Sports’ popular talk show Undisputed.
According to the New York Post, the NFL Hall of Famer reached a buyout deal with the network to leave the long-running morning show he has co-hosted alongside Skip Bayless since 2016. Sharpe’s final show is expected to air after the 2023 NBA Finals. Before news of the 54-year-old’s departure from Undisputed made headlines, tension flared between Sharpe and Bayless on the show after Bills safety Damar Hamlin collapsed on the field during the Week 17 game against the Bengals. On Twitter, Bayless appeared to show no compassion following Hamlin’s shocking health scare. Read more
Tommy Tuberville, Deion Sanders and the subjugation of ‘coach speak.’ By ken Makin / Andscape
Former Auburn football coach Tommy Tuberville parlayed the exploitation of mostly Black athletes into a multi-million dollar coaching career and a foray into politics.
Tuberville seemed to have forgotten the reason for his success last October when he weighed in on the reparations debate and essentially called Black people criminals. His words and the commentaries of other coaches recently shouldn’t be seen as only “coach speak.” This is part of the language of football, but it also subjugates young men in a manner that reduces them to property. Read more
Making the case for Celtics coach Joe Mazzulla. By William C. Rhoden / Andscape
In 1972, Ray Scott — the NBA’s first Black Coach of the Year — was a young assistant thrust into the head job. He thinks Boston’s coach is heading in the right direction.
Mazzulla led the Celtics to 57 regular-season wins. In the playoffs, Boston stumbled past Atlanta in six games and squeaked by Philadelphia in seven. Rather than being seen as an example of NBA parity, the Celtics’ playoff performances were used as an indictment of Mazzulla and sparked a social media feeding frenzy to get rid of him. Read more
Pistons hiring Monty Williams as next head coach in historic deal. By Omari Sankofa II
After nearly two months of searching, the Detroit Pistons connected on their home run swing to address their vacant head coach position.
Former Phoenix Suns coach Monty Williams is expected to sign a contract with the Pistons worth north of $10 million annually within the next few days, a league source told the Free Press on Wednesday night. The incentive-laden deal will make Williams, the 2022 NBA Coach of the Year, one of the NBA’s highest-paid coaches. ESPN reports the deal is for six years and $78.5 million, which would make him the highest paid coach in NBA history. The Athletic reports there are team options for a seventh and eighth year, and incentives that could increase the deal to $100 million. Read more
A Negro Leagues Star Is Still Sharing His Story. By Louie Lazar / NYT
A pastor for more than 50 years, William Greason, 98, occasionally tells tales of a lifetime ago, when he mentored Willie Mays and played in the last Negro World Series.
Long before he was a preacher, though, Greason had an entirely different life. In his dark, silent study down the hall at Bethel Baptist, on a shelf stuffed with old theological books, is a photograph of the 1948 pennant celebration of the Birmingham Black Barons of baseball’s Negro leagues. A young Greason beams at the center. Greason, 98, is one of baseball’s “forgotten heroes,” according to the Center for Negro League Baseball Research. Seventy-five years ago, he shut down the Kansas City Monarchs in the Negro American League’s championship series and then earned the Black Barons’ only win in the final Negro World Series, which the Black Barons lost to the Homestead Grays. 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.