Featured
Gen. Milley strikes back at Trump in farewell speech: “We don’t take an oath to a wannabe dictator.” By Tatyana Tandanpolie / Salon
The general’s remarks come just one week after the former president suggested he be put to death
“We don’t take an oath to a king, or a queen, or to a tyrant or dictator, and we don’t take an oath to a wannabe dictator,” Milley said. “We don’t take an oath to an individual. We take an oath to the Constitution, and we take an oath to the idea that is America, and we’re willing to die to protect it.” He continued, “Every soldier, sailor, airman, Marine, guardian and Coast Guardsman, each of us commits our very life to protect and defend that document, regardless of personal price. And we are not easily intimidated.” Read more
Related: Trump’s retribution plan: Becoming America’s first dictator. Chauncey Devega / Salon
Related: Trump’s Promise of Lawlessness. By Alex Kingsbury / NYT
Political / Social
Joe Biden Slams Plans By Trump And ‘MAGA Extremists’ To Gut Democratic Institutions. By Paul Blumenthal / HuffPost
The president called out Trump’s plans to gut the civil service and bring the entire executive branch under personal presidential control.
Trump’s plans to gut the civil service and bring the entire federal bureaucracy under his direct control flows from his assertion that the Constitution gives him “the right to do whatever he wants as president,” Biden said, quoting Trump. Read more
Related: Biden Talks Trump, Democracy and SCOTUS Ethics With ProPublica. By John Harwood / ProPublica
The Case for Being Skeptical of Trump’s Huge Lead. By Walter Shapiro / TNR
The media declared Trump a winner of the second GOP debate he didn’t even show up for. But an early primary loss could hurt his campaign.
But what Perino and the morning-after punditry miss is that it is still comparatively early in the Republican cycle—and there is still ample time for a non-Trump candidate to make a definitive move. While Trump is obviously the favorite, the Republican 2024 caucus and primary calendar is weird enough to leave the former president vulnerable in the early going. Read more
Related: What It Takes to Win Trump’s Voters. By Kali Holloway / The Nation
Related: There are more of us than there are of them. Lucian K. Truscott IV / Salon
White People Love Tim Scott For Downplaying Racism: Polls. By Zack Linly / Newsone
Here’s a simple truth: White conservatives love Black conservatives because Black conservatives say all white people-friendly things. There’s really no other reason.
There’s never any kind of policy or ideological point of view Black Republican officials and candidates hold that sets them apart from the rest of the GOP. They’re always very generic in terms of that. As much as they love to consider themselves “free thinkers” because they vote and view racism differently than most Black people, there’s never anything original about how they think. Read more
Related: Tim Scott Suggests Slavery Wasn’t as Bad as Welfare for Black Americans. By Edith Olmsted / TNR
The Court’s Affirmative-Action Ban Is a Gift in Disguise. By Feisal G. Mohammed / Chronicle of Higher Ed.
I have never been a fan of campus-diversity lingo. In its orthodox expressions, it praises diversity as an aspect of well-rounded training: Every student benefits from being exposed to a diversity of people and perspectives.
Tomorrow’s leaders in industry, or medicine, or law, the argument runs, will be more effective if in their university experience they share classrooms with people of various backgrounds and life experiences. Such language seems designed to pacify all and satisfy none. And it is especially unsatisfying in its implication that some of the main beneficiaries of diversity programs are those who come from traditionally privileged groups. Read more
Related: Biden administration advises colleges on how to preserve diversity. By Nick Anderson / Wash Post
Related: Will top schools continue ‘legacy’ admission preferences? Many say yes. By Nick Anderson / Wash Post
Tesla workers faced slurs, racist graffiti and retaliation, federal suit says. Anumita Kaur / Wash Post
Elon Musk’s electric vehicle company Tesla allowed racial harassment of its Black employees to run rampant at its Fremont, Calif., plant and retaliated against some workers who complained, the federal agency charged with enforcing civil rights laws alleged in a lawsuit Thursday.
Black employees routinely faced racial slurs, including variations of the n-word, at the Fremont site, according to the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC), and graffiti depicting nooses, swastikas and more were casually drawn across the facility’s public spaces. Tesla did not immediately respond to request for comment. Read more
After lawsuit, a town elects first Black leaders in its 200-year history. By Joe Heim and Erin Cox / Wash Post
Brandy James made history by becoming one of the first two Black people elected to the Federalsburg, Md., town council. (Jeremiah Cephas). In a community where about 43 percent of the population is Black, the election of Black leaders was long overdue, said residents and civil rights leaders
Small-town elections where just a few hundred people cast ballots typically don’t get much outside attention. But Tuesday’s vote in Federalsburg, a 200-year-old enclave of about 2,800 people in Caroline County on Maryland’s Eastern Shore, made history as residents elected the town’s first Black council members. Read more
For Black Mothers, Birthing Centers, Once a Refuge, Become a Battleground. By Emily Baumgaertner / NYT
Some say the facilities, which focus on autonomy in childbirth, could lead to better health outcomes — but officials are tightening rules, citing risk.
Ms. Glaze found herself telling every woman she knew about Oasis Family Birthing Center in Birmingham, which was run by an obstetrician and midwives — many of them Black, like her — and encouraged patients through an unhurried, uninterrupted, natural labor process. Read more
What we know about the flash-mob-style ransacking in Philadelphia. By Timothy Bella and Ben Brasch / Wash Post
Dozens of people were arrested after a group of teenagers looted several stores in Philadelphia’s Center City District on Tuesday. The flash-mob-style ransacking at stores such as Apple, Foot Locker and Lululemon came after a peaceful protest over a judge’s decision to dismiss all charges, including murder, against former Philadelphia police officer Mark Dial in the Aug. 14 fatal shooting of 27-year-old Eddie Irizarry. Read more
Ethics / Morality / Religion
The fruit of the Spirit is not optional, despite what you might witness online. By Karen Swallow Prior / RNS
“When did the fruit of the Spirit become optional for Christians?” Before social media, I honestly never knew people who claimed to be Christians would treat one another with such cruelty.
But the fruit of the Spirit, Paul writes, “is love, joy, peace, forbearance, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness and self-control. Against such things there is no law. Those who belong to Christ Jesus have crucified the flesh with its passions and desires. Since we live by the Spirit, let us keep in step with the Spirit.” Read more
I want to attend racially-mixed Churches, not All-White Republican Churches. By Julie Nichols / Patheos
I have faced a great reality; I am no longer able to regularly attend a mostly white Church which also leans Republican
Simply, I don’t want to be a part of a faith community which is potentially participating in right-winged fascism with the mission to “purify” the nation as white, straight, Republican, and “Christian.” How does race and other minority statuses have something to do with where people attend Church? Let’s look at history. Read more
Black Catholics have made their mark in the history of American music. By Nate Tinner-Williams / NCR
In the story of American music, many critics and casual listeners alike have become increasingly hip to the notion that Black musicians are, on the whole, the heart and soul of the narrative.
From gospel to jazz to blues to R&B, rap, rock ‘n’ roll and pop, African Americans have shone brightly from the earliest days of stateside recorded music, with their West-African-influenced sensibilities tracing back to the days before, during and immediately after the transatlantic slave trade. What is less acknowledged, however, is the influence of religion in the story — and specifically Catholicism. Read more
Historical / Cultural
The Man Who Became Uncle Tom. By Clint Smith / The Atlantic
Harriet Beecher Stowe said that Josiah Henson’s life had inspired her most famous character. But Henson longed to be recognized by his own name, and for his own achievements.
Stowe first wrote about Henson’s 1849 autobiography in her 1853 book A Key to Uncle Tom’s Cabin, an annotated bibliography of sorts in which she cited a number of nonfiction accounts she had used as source material for her best-selling novel. Stowe later said that Henson’s narrative had served as an inspiration for Uncle Tom. Read more
America Helped My Ancestors Flee Antisemitism. The Lakota Paid the Price. By Rebecca Clarren / Politico
A new book explores the opportunity Jewish immigrants found on the South Dakota prairie — and what it cost Native Americans.
I grew up looking at mysterious, never-explained photographs of my Jewish ancestors posing in studios or on roadsides with Indigenous people in South Dakota, not far from my family’s ranch. In one sepia-tone picture, my great-great-uncle Jack, his gun holstered on the outside of his suit jacket, shakes hands with an Indigenous man wearing a war bonnet and holding a beaded bag and pipe. Read more
How Black Americans almost built a utopia. By
In the 1960s, Floyd B. McKissick, a prolific civil rights activist, embarked on an ambitious idea: What if Black Americans could build and lead their own city? A place centered on the idea of racial equality and economic power, where everyone, especially people of color and the poor, could thrive? That idea turned into Soul City, North Carolina: the Black-led capitalist utopia that almost came to be. Read more
Lessons for today from the overlooked stories of Black teachers during the segregated civil rights era. By Marlee Bunch / The Conversation
My grandmother’s name was Mrs. Zola Jackson.
As one of the handful of Black teachers in Mississippi during the Jim Crow era of racially segregated public schools, she faced a daunting challenge in providing a first-class education to students considered second-class citizens. Educated at Rust College, a historically Black school, in the 1940s, she taught in the small city of Hattiesburg for over 30 years from 1943-1975, the majority of which was spent in elementary classrooms at DePriest, the school for Black children. Before the 1954 landmark Brown v. Board decision that deemed segregated schools “separate and unequal,” the efforts of Black teachers went unheralded, underappreciated and virtually unknown. Read more
How Black WWI veterans got their own VA hospital in Tuskegee. By Debbie Elliott / NPR
The Tuskegee VA hospital was the first in the country to be led by an all-Black medical team. It became a hub for Black medical professionals to develop their careers.
In the early 1920s, the nearby Tuskegee Institute — a historically Black university — donated land to the federal government to build what was originally dedicated in 1923 as the “Veterans Hospital for Negro Disabled Soldiers.” “It really is a piece of history because there was no other VA built like this,” Farooqi says. “It was built specifically for veterans of color, Black American veterans and others who were not receiving the same quality of care or access to care following WWI that they really should have been and that they deserved.” Read more
Suspect arrested in Tupac Shakur killing from 1996. By Janay Kingsberry and Samantha Chery / Wash Post
A man has been charged with murder in the fatal drive-by shooting of Tupac Shakur, a breakthrough in a long-unsolved case that has held the public’s interest ever since the legendary rapper was gunned down near the Las Vegas Strip in 1996.
Duane “Keffe D” Davis — a self-described former gang member who has publicly claimed to have witnessed the killing — was arrested by Las Vegas police early Friday, police officials confirmed in a news conference Friday afternoon. He had previously been indicted on a charge of murder with use of a deadly weapon by a Clark County grand jury, according to prosecutors. It is the first arrest police have made in the 27-year-old case. Read more
Related: Tupac Shakur Remained a Defining Rap Figure After His Death. By Jonathan Abrams / NYT
Beyoncé’s journey to mastery. By Thembisa S. Mshaka / Andscape
As the Renaissance World Tour comes to a close, one of Beyoncé’s early collaborators looks back on her career
At this point, no curtain is big enough for Beyoncé. With a screen at least two stories high and running the width of the stage, she opened a stunning visual portal. Through it, she transported us, serving a spectacular feast for the senses. From her pristine vocals to the band’s ferocious play and the intense choreography with standout moments from Les Twins, Honey Balenciaga and Blue Ivy Carter during “Black Parade,” NRG Stadium was in a constant state of elation that only stopped for the mute challenge. H-Town understood and aced the assignment. Read more
Black Music Sunday: ‘Someday We’ll All Be Free’—Remembering Donny Hathaway on his birthday. By Denise Oliver Velez / Daily Kos
Though we lost him in 1979, the impact of Hathaway’s music is everlasting.
His professors at Howard recognized Hathaway’s talent and provided ample encouragement. During his time at Howard, he met both his future wife, Eulaulah, and recording artist Roberta Flack. Hathaway would leave Howard without his degree after three years of study; he had begun to receive lucrative job offers, in part because of his membership in a group called the Rick Powell Trio. Read more and listen here
Sports
NFL Hall of Famer, Detroit Lions star Lem Barney center of family feud. By Bill Laytner / USA Today
Former Detroit Lions great has had guardians looking out for his welfare as his health declines.
Barney’s glory years ended in 1977. Now, the former superstar can barely say “yes” or “no,” and he can’t get out of bed. In court documents, Barney is listed not as a retired Detroit Lions superstar, not as a longtime community relations executive with major corporations in Detroit, not as backup singer for Marvin Gaye’s 1971 Motown hit “What’s Going On?” but instead with an ominous label: “Legally Incapacitated Individual.”Like countless other former football players, from high school to the pros, Barney endured repeated head impacts, concussion after concussion. Apart from his football injuries, Barney, at 78, is like millions of aging Americans, sadly declining, mentally and physically. Read more
Judge orders the end of the conservatorship between Michael Oher and the Tuohys. By Ayana Archie / NPR
A Tennessee judge has ordered the end of the conservatorship between former NFL player Michael Oher and the Tuohy family, all of whom were the subject of the Oscar-winning 2009 film The Blind Side.
Shelby County Probate Court Judge Kathleen Gomes said she is ending the 2004 conservatorship, but is not dismissing the case Oher brought against the family in August asking them to provide accounting information for his finances over the years, according to the Associated Press. Read more
Steph Curry, golfer and entrepreneur, plots his second act. By Marcus Thompson II / The Athletic
His love of golf is undeniable.
You can count on him being glued to the Ryder Cup this weekend. But nothing is stopping Curry from doing like most fanatics of fairways and just playing. He gets access to some of the best courses in the world, with just about anyone he wants. He’s already played at Augusta National and Cypress Point. He’s played with former President Barack Obama. When he hangs up his sneakers, Curry assuredly will have a wealth of sponsorship exemptions to compete in tournaments with pros, if not join a tour. So why is he choosing to take on the tradition of golf’s exclusiveness? Why is he volunteering as a giddy pied piper for outsiders to cultivate a more inclusive space for a rising generation? Read more
Where do Colorado, Deion Sanders go from here after falling to two top-10 teams? By David Ubben / The Athletic
Colorado, as a spectacle this season, almost certainly peaked in the past two weeks. An easier schedule lies ahead, but it also means The Rock probably won’t give the Buffs another pregame speech.
The Buffs have essentially been the most-watched team in America every week this season. Attention will still be heightened, but after taking two convincing losses and with blue-blooded opponents behind them, the spotlight won’t be as bright. We’ve probably seen the last time 10 million people watch Colorado in 2023. Read more
Related: Deion Sanders’ worth to Colorado is an estimated $280 million. By Brent Schrotenboer / USA Today
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.