Featured
A Health Crisis Is Brewing for Black Kids. By Margo Snipe / Capital B
New research from the University of Michigan shows shows that although racism might not be the most common type of discrimination, it had the greatest impact on teens.
Ignored complaints of students using racist slurs, Black children getting in trouble for reporting instances of discrimination, and white students mockingly reenacting the killing of George Floyd by Minneapolis police officers are all outlined in a lawsuit that hit a Georgia school district earlier this year.
The case is just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to the repeated stress Black youth are exposed to as they’re growing up. Racism, and the chronic stress that it causes, is weathering Black Americans’ health, driving health disparities from anxiety to heart disease and cancer. And, it’s starting at an incredibly young age.
For Black kids, that stress is often caused by racism that comes in school settings: from peers, teachers, or administrators. It’s bleeding into both a mental and physical health crisis, and for Black boys and girls, exactly how that stress looks and affects their bodies can vary by gender. Read more
Black Success, White Backlash. By Elijah Anderson / The Atlantic
Black prosperity has provoked white resentment that can make life exhausting for people of color—and it has led to the undoing of policies that have nurtured Black advancement.
For some white people displaced from their jobs by globalization and deindustrialization, the successful Black person with a good job is the embodiment of what’s wrong with America. The spectacle of Black doctors, CEOs, and college professors “out of their place” creates an uncomfortable dissonance, which white people deal with by mentally relegating successful Black people to the ghetto. That Black man who drives a new Lexus and sends his children to private school—he must be a drug kingpin, right? Read more
Political / Social
David Rothkopf on war in Gaza: “Revenge is not a strategy. It doesn’t make people safe.” By Chauncey Devega / Salon
Israel’s invasion of Gaza may “compound one set of atrocities with another” just as 9/11 did, Rothkopf warns
Irael’s war against Hamas in Gaza is a test of both America’s global leadership and our dysfunctional domestic politics. Both those problems are largely the result of the Republican Party’s all-out embrace of Donald Trump, borderline fascism and outright chaos. This war is also a test of the American people’s collective capacity for solidarity and empathy, both with the Israeli people as they confront a 9/11-style disaster and the Palestinian people of Gaza, most of whom had nothing to do with the Hamas attacks but now face the catastrophic consequences of a large-scale war. Read more
Related: Biden shows solidarity with Israel in a bold wartime visit. By Peter Baker / NYT
Related: The long history of Black solidarity with Palestinians and Jews. By Fabiola Cineas / Vox
The Debate Over How Dangerous Trump Is Rages On. By Thomas B. Edsall / NYT
Trump’s success in persuading a majority of Republicans of the legitimacy of his palpably false claims has revealed the vulnerability of American institutions to a subversion of democratic norms. That much is well known.
Most recently, these questions have been pushed to the fore by two political scientists at Harvard, Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt, who published “Tyranny of the Minority” a month ago. Their thesis: By 2016, America was on the brink of a genuinely multiracial democracy — one that could serve as a model for diverse societies across the world. But just as this new democratic experiment was beginning to take root, America experienced an authoritarian backlash so fierce that it shook the foundations of the republic, leaving our allies across the world worried about whether the country had any democratic future at all. Read more
Related: What to know about Jim Jordan and the 2020 election results. By Zachary B. Wolf / CNN
Related: Day of the goons: Win or lose, Jim Jordan marks a new low point for the GOP. By Brian Karem / CNN
Judge Chutkan Finds Trump Poses ‘Grave Threat’ To Judicial Process In Gag Order. By S.V. Date / HuffPost
The coup-attempting former president is banned from attacking prosecutors, judicial staff and witnesses, but is allowed to criticize Biden and the DOJ.
“Since his indictment, and even after the government filed the instant motion, defendant has continued to make similar statements attacking individuals involved in the judicial process, including potential witnesses, prosecutors, and court staff,” U.S. District Judge Tanya Chutkan wrote in her three-page order formalizing her ruling from the bench Monday. Read more
Tim Scott gets a brutal wake-up call about his presidential campaign. By Ja’han Jones / MSNBC
A leading super PAC supporting the South Carolina senator’s presidential bid said it will be canceling TV ad spending, signaling a campaign in free fall.
In other words, TIM PAC is keeping (most of) its money rather than wasting it on a campaign that appears to be in free fall. In polls, Scott’s campaign hasn’t been able to break past the low single digits. And recently, his campaign officials have pleaded with donors to stick with him until the primaries reach his home state of South Carolina, where they’ve said he could change the tide. Read more
Behind closed doors, Marines struggle with a glaring diversity problem. By Hope Hodge Seck / Wash Post
The number of Black Marines who fly fighter jets has fallen. Critics say the service appears unwilling to take aggressive steps that could level the playing field.
Related: Presidents Break With Supreme Court on Affirmative Action. by Colleen Flaherty / Inside Higher Ed.
Related: Senate sees drop in Black top staffers: report. By Cheyanne M. Daniels / The Hill
The Conservative Effort To Take Over A Nationally Ranked School System. By Nathalie Baptiste / HuffPost
A Virginia county’s schools have faced tons of controversy — and right-wingers are convinced they can fix everything.
“Shame on you! Shame on you! Shame on you!” hundreds of mostly white parents jeered at the Loudoun County Public School board members. The crowd waved signs demanding that educators stop teaching racism, and that they should instruct students that there are only two genders. It was the final meeting of the academic school year in June 2021, and these parents had convinced themselves that efforts to teach accurate U.S. history was secretly an attempt to foster anti-white sentiment in schools. Read more
We 7 former Florida college presidents say enough is enough. William G. Bradshaw et al. / Tampa Bay Times
We need to protect everyone’s fundamental right to learn about and openly discuss ideas that some would suppress.
There is a movement occurring in more than 30 states that seeks to prohibit discussion in higher education settings of topics deemed “divisive” or “inappropriate” by some often ill-defined metric. Nowhere has this movement had more traction than right here in Florida. Read more
Our Leaders’ Shameful Response to Islamophobia’s Fatal Resurgence. By Hafiz Rashid / The New Republic
A yawning leadership vacuum has given rise to a new wave of bigotry in the wake of the Israel-Hamas war. Mourners carry the coffin of 6-year-old Wadea Al-Fayoume during his funeral on October 16, in LaGrange, Illinois.
Late Saturday morning in a Chicago suburb, a 6-year-old boy was found stabbed to death, his mother seriously wounded. The details of the crime that quickly emerged rhymed with the news cycle in a way that brought familiar dread: The mother and son were targeted by their killer—who turned out to be their landlord—due to their Palestinian and Muslim background. He had been angered by the Hamas attack on Israel nearly two weeks ago and his tenants ended up being the too-convenient target of his rage. Read more
Exonerated man wrongly jailed in Florida for 16 years is killed by Georgia deputy during traffic stop. By Marlene Lenthang / NBC News
Since his exoneration in 2020, Leonard Cure had been working in security and hoping to go to college, and he was buying his first home, Broward County authorities said.
A man who was wrongly incarcerated for 16 years in Florida before being exonerated and released was fatally shot by a sheriff’s deputy in Georgia during a traffic stop Monday, officials said. Leonard Cure, 53, was convicted of armed robbery in Florida in 2003, according to the Broward County State Attorney’s Office. In 2020, he was the first person to be exonerated as part of the state attorney’s office Conviction Review Unit after a reinvestigation of the case found he was innocent. Read more
An American Puzzle: Fitting Race in a Box. K.K. Rebecca Lai and
Census categories for race and ethnicity have shaped how the nation sees itself. Here’s how they have changed over the last 230 years.
Since 1790, the decennial census has played a crucial role in creating and reshaping the ever-changing views of racial and ethnic identity in the United States. Over the centuries, the census has evolved from one that specified broad categories — primarily “free white” people and “slaves” — to one that attempts to encapsulate the country’s increasingly complex demographics. The latest adaptation proposed by the Biden administration in January seeks to allow even more race and ethnicity options for people to describe themselves than the 2020 census did. If approved, the proposed overhaul would most likely be adopted across all surveys in the country about health, education and the economy. Here’s what the next census could look like. Read more
Ethics / Morality / Religion
The Moral Questions at the Heart of the Gaza War. By David French / NYT
As Israeli soldiers mass outside the Gaza Strip, preparing to launch a ground invasion that could lead to extraordinarily intense urban combat, there is a community of people who know what these soldiers are about to face. And that community knows that there is no way through the fight without sorrow, confusion and terrible heartbreak.
American veterans of Iraq and Afghanistan know both the necessity of confronting a force like Hamas, which President Biden called “pure evil,” and the horrifying choices that decision entails. And we know that discussions of law and tactics — as important as they are — provide only partial answers. There is no way to escape the moral challenge of war. Read more
Related: American Christians Should Stand with Israel under Attack. By Russell Moore / CT
Related: Amid Israel-Hamas War, Local Christians Seek Righteous Anger and Gospel Hope. By Jayson Casper / CT
Hope for High Conflict with Amanda Ripley. The Russell Moore Show / CT Podcast
“Our church lived through the 2016 and 2020 presidential elections divided. Our church lived through Black Lives Matter protests divided. Our church lived through COVID divided. How are we going to get through 2024?”
That’s one of the questions that Russell Moore is asked on a regular basis, and it’s not an easy one to answer. Enter Amanda Ripley, author of High Conflict: Why We Get Trapped and How We Get Out. An investigative journalist and the co-founder of Good Conflict, Ripley has spent years exploring how humans engage in disagreements that threaten to tear people apart. Read more and listen here
Donald Trump and the exceptions of American evangelicalism. By John G. Stackhouse Jr. / RNS
Evangelicals still see themselves as the true custodians of American authenticity.
This attitude plays out in the present case in that white American evangelicals simultaneously view themselves as alienated from mainstream American culture as represented in the main institutions of American life while also remaining the true custodians of American authenticity. It makes sense today on an even broader scale among an even broader consensus of white evangelicals in the United States. Afraid of permanent and widespread job loss, afraid of a popular culture that ignores their values when it doesn’t openly mock them and afraid of immigration and multiculturalism making the United States less recognizable — it is no wonder they support a bully happy to articulate their rage in furious bursts, even if not in coherent speeches. Read more
Historical / Cultural
Ken Burns Warns Against “People Who Wish to Sanitize Our History.” By Valentina Valentini / Vanity Fair
The prolific documentarian’s latest project, American Buffalo, explores the near extinction of the majestic animals—as well as the Native Americans who depend on them.
“I’ve made films for the last 50 years about the US,” says Burns, “but I’ve also made films about us. That is to say, the lowercase, two-letter plural pronoun. All of the intimacy of ‘us’ and ‘we’ and ‘our,’ and all of the majesty and the complexity and the contradiction, and even the controversy of the US. That is a privileged place to start, and one of the obligations of that is to try to figure out ways to balance and reconcile these disparate things.” Read more
Killers of the Flower Moon: What is the true story about the Osage Murders? By Aja Romano / Vox
Rita was one of the few remaining members of the Osage Nation following nearly a century of brutal displacement. Throughout the 19th century, the government repeatedly forced the Osage to relocate from their current lands in Kansas to, finally, a much smaller, desolate reservation in northern Oklahoma. With the discovery of oil on Osage land in the late 1890s, however, the 2,229 tribe members who were left suddenly came into tremendous amounts of personal wealth, and prosperity finally seemed to be once more within the community’s grasp. But now, a ring of unknown murderers had begun to target members of the tribe — including Rita’s family. Read more
Related: Martin Scorsese on Making “Killers of the Flower Moon.” By Richard Brody / The New Yorker
Rachel Maddow offers a chilling history lesson — and hope for today. By Kathleen Belew / Wash Post
In her new book, ‘Prequel,’ Maddow looks at a past moment of crisis that might help us understand both the threats we face today and how we can endure them
The remarkable life of Samuel Ringgold Ward. By Kellie Carter Jackson / The Nation
Like Douglass and Tubman, Samuel Ringgold Ward was born enslaved on the eastern shore of Maryland. In 1818, when he was 3 months old, his parents escaped slavery with their child in tow, heading first to New Jersey and later settling in New York. Yet even in the “free” North, Ward grew up in a world darkened by the violence of slavery and fierce racial discrimination. Though he lived free and was educated in the African Free School in New York City, he was a fugitive in the eyes of the law. Samuel Ringgold Ward: A Life of Struggle. By R.J.M. Blackett. Read more
Jada Pinkett Smith opens up about depression, writing “Worthy” and her version of a happy ending. By D. Watkins / Salon
The “Red Table Talk” host talks trauma, Tupac and the “layered, complex event” that was Will Smith’s Oscars slap
Jada Pinkett Smith has it all: a beautiful family, famous husband, Emmy Award-winning talk show. She is a rockstar, author of a bestselling children’s book and star of multiple movies and TV shows. At 52, Pinkett Smith has lived the dreams of so many people and is still growing. And yet, even with her success, she recently contemplated suicide. Pinkett Smith opened up about her bouts with depression and the road to understanding the things that really mattered on a recent episode of “Salon Talks.” Read more
Sly Stone’s memoir is almost as fascinating as the fact that the book exists at all. By Jack Hamilton / Slate
It’s only the latest twist from one of the 1960s’ most misunderstood geniuses.
Very few artists have changed the course of popular music, and far fewer have managed to do so twice within a five-year span. Sylvester Stewart, better known to the world as Sly Stone, is in the latter category. In late 1967, Sly and his band, the Family Stone, released the thunderous single “Dance to the Music,” which reached No. 8 on the Billboard Hot 100, a chart position that does not begin to do justice to its impact. Sly Stone, now 80 years old, has just published a memoir, titled Thank You (Falettinme Be Mice Elf Agin). The first thing that must be said about Thank You is that it is a miracle that it exists at all. For decades Sly has been one of music’s greatest ghost stories, a man who had descended into a nightmarish spiral of drug abuse and effectively withdrawn from public life. Read more
He spent a lifetime collecting the blues. The Smithsonian listened. By Geoff Edgers / Wash Post
Smithsonian’s Folkways label and American History Museum are releasing Robert ‘Mack’ McCormick’s tapes, research and writings as part of Folkways’ 75th anniversary. From left, Robert “Mack” McCormick, Roosevelt Sykes, Sunnyland Slim holding McCormick’s daughter, Susannah, and Robert Shaw at the Montreal Expo in 1971
Robert “Mack” McCormick’s life was all about the blues. His Houston home was stuffed with reel-to-reel tapes, research files and vinyl records. But by the time he had died at age 85 in 2015, few really knew what his collection contained. That included his daughter, Susannah Nix. She was 3 when he finished his last significant project, the liner notes for a 1974 album featuring 1920s recordings by Texas musician Henry Thomas. Which is why Nix thinks she knows exactly how her father would feel about the Smithsonian’s public reveal of the unruly collection McCormick coined “The Monster.” Read more
Jazz’s Hancock Competition Returns, Crowning an Electrifying Rising Star.
Jahari Stampley, a 23-year-old pianist from Chicago, won the prize as the genre’s premier coronation ceremony for young talent was held for the first time since 2019.
After a four-year hiatus, the Herbie Hancock Institute of Jazz International Competition swung back into action last weekend at the Perelman Performing Arts Center in Lower Manhattan, and even before the judges announced a winner, it seemed possible that a star was being born. His name is Jahari Stampley, he hails from Chicago and despite being virtually unknown nationally until now, he has a style that is both timeless and unmistakably his own. 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.