Featured
How tens of thousands of Black U.S. doctors simply vanished. By Uché Blackstock / Wash Post
For centuries in this country, White-only medical schools, with exclusionary policies and practices, made it virtually impossible for Black people to receive medical training. It was only after the Civil War, with thousands of injured veterans in desperate need of medical care, that a small handful of Black trainees began to be admitted to White medical schools in the North. And it wasn’t until Reconstruction that a number of Black medical schools sprang up in the South, enabling Black people to finally have access to medical training in greater numbers.
These schools were Howard University College of Medicine, established in D.C. in 1868; Meharry Medical College, established in Nashville in 1876; Leonard Medical School, established in Raleigh, N.C., in 1882; New Orleans University Medical College, founded in 1887; Knoxville College Medical Department, founded in 1895; Chattanooga National Medical College, founded in 1902; and the University of West Tennessee College of Physicians and Surgeons, founded in Memphis in 1904.
And then, that promising legacy was abruptly extinguished. The reason was the publication of the Flexner Report — a landmark document in U.S. medical history that had a devastating effect on the number of Black physicians in this country. Read more
Related: ‘Legacy’ author Uché Blackstock discusses racism in medicine. By Tonya Mosely / NPR Fresh Air
Political / Social
Trump’s criminal rebrand of the Republican Party is complete. By Chauncey Devega / Salon
From the party of law and order to Trump as the leader of a mob: The GOP of 2024 looks like a cult
Today’s Republican Party is a de facto political crime organization. Donald Trump continues to be the Big Boss. With his win in the Iowa Republican caucus, Trump further cemented his control over the Republican Party. His “rivals” are all fading away as they try to win back his favor and hope to be hired in the new regime if he takes power in 2025. Read more
Related: Sen. Tim Scott Said 4 Words To Trump That Made People Cringe To Their Cores. By
Related: We Are Normalizing Trump. Again. By Thomas B. Edsall / NYT
Nikki Haley’s Problem: Her Party Is Nuts. By Will Saletan / The Bulwark
Iowa and New Hampshire have exposed the pathologies of Republican voters.
NIKKI HALEY HAS NOW BEATEN DONALD TRUMP TWICE, in Iowa and New Hampshire, among two groups of voters who, in a saner world, would be deciding the Republican presidential nomination. The first group is Republican primary and caucus voters who acknowledge that Trump legitimately lost the 2020 presidential election. The second group, which overlaps with the first, is Republican primary and caucus voters who accept that if Trump were to be convicted of a crime, he would be unfit to serve as president.
Haley’s problem—and the problem for her party, our country, and the world—is that neither of these groups represents a majority of Republicans or Republican primary voters. Most rank-and-file Republicans deny the results of the 2020 election and are willing to support a convicted criminal for president. The Republican electorate is deeply pathological. And Haley’s losses to Trump are a measure of that pathology. Read more
Related: New Hampshire Primary Takeaway: We Are Not a Serious Country. By Matt Lewis / The Daily Beast
Related: Why did Trump share a conspiracy theory about Nikki Haley’s citizenship? By
Ron DeSantis ends the most humiliating presidential run in history with one final disgrace. By Heather Digby Parton / Salon
Who would ever have guessed that the latest Republican Great Whitebread Hope would crash and burn even before the New Hampshire primary?
What DeSantis did to his own state in service of his grasping ambition was downright wicked and it should have tipped off the punditocracy to the fact that he was being unduly influenced by right-wing internet politics. DeSantis who said just last week, “You can be the most worthless Republican in America, but if you kiss the ring he’ll say you’re wonderful.” Just six days later, without even a hint of embarrassment, he proved that to be true. He kissed the ring and Trump said “he was very gracious, and he endorsed me, so I appreciate that.” Read more
How the Fani Willis allegations could hit the Trump Georgia case. By Ella Lee / The Hill
Allegations of a romance between Fulton County (Ga.) District Attorney Fani Willis (D) and a special prosecutor she appointed to head former President Trump’s 2020 election interference case have created a whirlwind of controversy around her and the historic prosecution.
But despite the political firestorm in recent weeks, the affair allegation will likely have little impact on the case itself, particularly because there are no laws in place that would require Willis or Wade to step back from the case. Read more
Related: Don’t fall for the trumped-up charges against Fani Willis. By Sabrina Haake / Salon
There’s finally a Clarence Thomas ethics inquiry underway. By Dennis Aftergut and Austin Sarat / Slate
Last week, the Campaign Legal Center, a voting rights and ethics advocacy group, disclosed what it considered a potentially promising—but extraordinarily opaque—one-sentence line in a newly released report from the Judicial Conference of the United States.
The Judicial Conference is, according to investigative journalists at ProPublica, a body of federal judges “led by the chief justice of the Supreme Court.” It “oversees the ethics and financial disclosures for more than 1,700 federal judges, including the nine justices of the high court.” The noteworthy line that the Campaign Legal Center highlighted came from the Judicial Conference’s Financial Disclosure Committee. It stated that there “was an ongoing review of public written allegations of errors or omissions in a filer’s financial disclosure reports.” The “filer” was presumed to be Justice Clarence Thomas. Read more
The Campaign Against D.E.I Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor / The New Yorker
Critical race theory was yesterday’s scandal. Today, diversity-equity-and-inclusion initiatives are in the crosshairs of critics across the political spectrum who seek to dismantle any notion that racism is systemic and thus deserving of systemic remedies.
Whether in business or at universities, D.E.I.’s opponents have portrayed such programs as unfair, divisive, anti-white, and now antisemitic. In one sense, the furious backlash against the anti-racist outpouring of 2020 and the decade-old Black Lives Matter movement can be interpreted as evidence of the success of those endeavors. But the fall of Claudine Gay is another example of the rapid retreat from D.E.I. and the reckoning on American racism that ushered it in, posing new challenges to those movements. Read more
Related: How a Diversity Initiative Changed Course With the Times. By Steve Lohr / NYT
Related: Facing Backlash, Some Corporate Leaders Go ‘Under the Radar’ With D.E.I.
Journalists of color hit hard by L.A. Times layoffs. By Curtis Bunn / NBC News
“The company has reneged on its promises to diversify its ranks since young journalists of color have been disproportionately affected,” the newspaper’s union says.
The Times has a seniority clause, which puts the most recent hires on the chopping block first when cuts would have to be made. After the police murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis in May 2020, the paper — like many outlets — invested in covering marginalized communities. Almost four years later, those workers were among the most recent hires. Read more
Dexter Scott King, son of Martin Luther King Jr., dies of cancer at 62. By AP and NPR
Dexter Scott King, the younger son of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. and Coretta Scott King, died Monday after battling prostate cancer.
The King Center in Atlanta, which Dexter King served as chairman, said the 62-year-old son of the civil rights icon died at his home in Malibu, California. His wife, Leah Weber King, said in a statement that he died “peacefully in his sleep.” The third of the Kings’ four children, Dexter King was named for the Dexter Avenue Baptist Church in Montgomery, Alabama, where his father served as a pastor when the Montgomery bus boycott launched him to national prominence in the wake of the 1955 arrest of Rosa Parks. Read more
Ethics / Morality / Religion
A compact with Christian America: What Donald Trump owes the religious right after Iowa. By Chauncey Devega / Salon
The Christian right supports Donald Trump and the MAGA movement because he has promised them great and special power and authority over American society.
There are less than ten months left to stop Trump and his plans to be America’s first dictator. The American people and their responsible leaders are rapidly running out of time to save their democracy and nation – and they are most certainly not acting with the speed, dedication, earnestness, and levels of commitment necessary to stop this impending disaster. The “urgency of now” in this time of democracy crisis is in many ways “the urgency of yesterday” (and last month and last year…and decades prior) and those Americans who believe in real “we the people” democracy must increase their efforts accordingly because if they lose to Trump and his forces there will be no “do-overs” or “resets” like in a videogame. This is real life. Read more
How the word ‘voodoo’ became a racial slur. By Daniel N. Boaz / RNS
In my 2023 book, “Voodoo: The History of a Racial Slur,” I argue that voodoo is an extremely problematic term with a deeply racist history.
Most African diaspora religions, which are religions that have roots in Africa, have been mislabeled as voodoo at some point in time. This is especially true of Haitian Vodou – the religion that is most frequently stereotyped by outsiders as “voodoo” in the 21st century. Read more
Grace in the Age of Guilt. By Russell Moore / Christianity Today
Rules and moral codes won’t save us in an era of judgment, hate, and superego. What will save us is mercy.
Politico’s Michael Schaffer sums up the fractured nature of American life right now this way: Conservative elites are scared of their audience, and liberal elites are scared of their employees. Even beyond the political circus, we see some people with resentment and rage breaking through any previous norms, and, with others, skyrocketing rates of anxiety and depression. Why? Read more
Historical / Cultural
Why did Nat Turner “confess”? By Patrick Rael / AAIHS
Turner sought to carry on in words the work he had begun with a sword.
Turner’s Confession shares many of the qualities of Augustine’s: his courageous and honest self-appraisal, and (through it) his expression of unwavering faith. Augustine: “It is He that made us and not we ourselves; nay, we have destroyed ourselves, but He that made us has remade us.” Likewise, Turner’s faith was such that he no longer existed for his own self; he had become nothing but divine instrument. Read more
Heather Cox Richardson and the battle over American history. By Kim Phillips-Fein / The Nation
We Have No Princes
Richardson’s distinctive persona and gentle egalitarianism are at the center of her new book, Democracy Awakening. She draws on her scholarly background as a historian of the Republican Party of the 1850s to make her case. Asserting that the party under Trump is committed to a radical vision of economic, racial, and social hierarchy, she argues that this is part of a much longer history, one that goes back to the 19th century and the years that preceded the Civil War. Read more
What Is the History of Fascism in the United States? By Richard J. Evans / The Nation
In Fascism Comes to America, Bruce Kuklick traces the shifting meanings of the term “fascist” from its origins to the present day and how it has, over the years, gradually lost its coherence. Nazi salute by Friends of New Germany at Madison Square Garden.(Photo: Larry Froeber / Getty Images)
From the very beginning, Italian fascism was a militaristic movement, glorifying war and armed conflict. Despite its destruction of democratic institutions, its establishment of a one-party state, its suppression of civil liberties, and its cruel and sometimes murderous treatment of its opponents, however, Italian fascism attracted many admirers across Europe and the world. Even Charlie Chaplin, whose 1940 movie The Great Dictator included a satirical depiction of Mussolini, found time in 1931 to praise him for making the Italian trains run on time. Read more
Related: ‘Nazi Town, USA’: It Did Happen Here. By Cathy Young / The Bulwark
121 potential gravesites found in former Black cemetery at Air Force base. By AP and NPR
TAMPA, Fla. — The U.S. Air Force plans to expand its search for gravesites in a former Black cemetery at a base in Florida after discovering 121 potential sites already, a base official said.
Lt. Laura Anderson told news stations this week that a nonintrusive archaeological survey performed over the past two years at MacDill Air Force Base in Tampa identified 58 probable graves and 63 possible graves. The base also deployed search teams to go over the area with ground penetrating radar and cadaver dogs. Read more
Black Projects 2024 Sundance: Luther Vandross, Magical Negroes. By Shanelle Genai / The Root
In case you missed it, the 2024 Sundance Film Festival is officially underway!
Encompassing nearly two weeks worth of feature, short documentary films and more, this year’s festival boasts a myriad of diverse stories from diverse storytellers and a slate that’s sure to produce some notable projects we’ll see in next year’s awards season. That being said—y’all already know how we down on this site. So keep reading to see what Black leading and/or Black directed projects you need to keep an eye out for. Read more
Ava DuVernay Wants to Build a New System. David Remnick / The New Yorker
The director behind “Selma” and “When They See Us” on how her latest film, “Origin,” drew inspiration and funding from unlikely sources—and “broke every rule” she’s learned from her years in Hollywood.
Who knows whether “Origin” will get any Oscar love. Some Hollywood stars—Angelina Jolie, J. J. Abrams, Ben Affleck, Guillermo del Toro—have tried to give it a boost by hosting screenings, but it was shut out at the Golden Globes. On the night of the ceremony, the actor Aunjanue Ellis-Taylor, who plays Isabel Wilkerson, was handing out flyers promoting “Origin” near a movie theatre in L.A. Whatever. Awards are awards and no more. DuVernay’s “Origin” is a film well worth engaging. Take it from The Front Row. Read more
David Oyelowo on bringing the first Black deputy U.S. marshal west of the Mississippi River to life. By Jonathan Capehart / Wash Post Podcast
In this conversation recorded for Washington Post Live on Jan. 10, actor David Oyewolo talks about his new series, “Lawmen: Bass Reeves,” in which he plays the eponymous Bass Reeves, the first Black deputy U.S. marshal west of the Mississippi River. Oyelowo also discusses what it was like to work with his wife in a part weighted with personal and historic significance, and why it was important for him to bring Reeves’s story to the screen. Listen here
Sports
Joel Embiid Scores 70, Leads Big Night For NBA Stars. By Derek Major / Black Enterprise
Philadelphia 76ers Center Joel Embiid led a big night for NBA stars, scoring 70 points against the San Antonio Spurs and rookie sensation Victor Wembanyama.
On the 18th anniversary of Kobe Bryant’s 81-point game for the Los Angeles Lakers—the second highest scoring game in NBA history, Embiid shot 24 of 41 from the field, including 1 of 2 from 3-point range, and made 21 of 23 free throws. For good measure, he added 18 rebounds in the Sixers‘ 133-123 victory. Read more
Nick Saban’s ‘epic era’ of coaching is over, but the exploitation of players in big-time college football is not. By Joseph N. Cooper / The Conversation
When Nick Saban, the legendary University of Alabama football coach, announced his retirement at age 72 in January 2024, various analysts and colleagues depicted his departure as the end of an “epic era” of coaching.
However, as the author of a book on the racially exploitative nature of college sports, I don’t see Saban as having been “chased away.” Rather, I see Saban’s retirement as his stepping away from an evolving college sports system that is increasingly empowering athletes in ways that he vocally condemned. Read more
NBA guards Chris Paul, Malcolm Brogdon give an assist to filmmaker Ava DuVernay’s ‘Origin.’ By Marc J. Spears / Andscape
League veterans make investments designed for social impact, among NBA players to contribute to awareness of film
NAACP Image Award winner and filmmaker Ava DuVernay was ecstatic to catch two assists in the form of financial investments from NBA guards Chris Paul and Malcolm Brogdon to help fund her new independent film, Origin. Read more
Why the Bucks fired Adrian Griffin and why Doc Rivers could be their next head coach. By Shams Charania, Sam Amick and Eric Nehm / The Athletic
The Bucks’ choice to fire first-year head coach Adrian Griffin on Tuesday was no overnight decision.
It was born out of months of underwhelming play with internal concerns growing about the severe decline of their once-elite defense, the flawed use of newcomer Damian Lillard alongside franchise centerpiece Giannis Antetokounmpo and a widespread fear that this group, which was widely expected to contend for a title, was likely to fall short if Milwaukee stood pat. Read more
Mel Tucker, former-MSU football coach, banned from future employment. By Kenny Jacoby / USA Today
Michigan State University stopped short of issuing the harshest possible sanctions against former head football coach Mel Tucker after disciplining him for sexual misconduct.
On Friday, Michigan State permanently banned Tucker from any future employment or affiliation with the college – which would have been highly unlikely anyway, given that it fired him for cause in late September. The sanctions, effective immediately, constitute his formal punishment after a campus investigation found him responsible for sexually harassing and exploiting Brenda Tracy, a rape survivor and prominent activist against sexual violence whom he had hired to speak to his team. Read more
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