Featured
What I See in the Video of Sonya Massey’s Killing. By Jenisha Watts / The Atlantic (Image IPM)
Let me tell you what I see and hear in the video of Sonya Massey’s killing: A nervous woman, head tilted down toward her phone, as if hoping someone—maybe a family member—has replied to her messages. A shaky voice wanting to hear words of reassurance.
“You didn’t see anybody?” she asks the two law-enforcement officers who were sent to her house after she had called 911 to report what she thought was an intruder.
The same week the footage of Massey’s killing was released, we saw Kamala Harris take the mantle of the Democratic Party. I know I can’t be the only one struggling with this cognitive dissonance. This, too, is what it means to be Black in America: One Black woman has the chance to win the most powerful position in the world, while at the same time, another Black woman, even at her most vulnerable, wearing her nightclothes and headscarf, is perceived as a threat—and shot to death in her kitchen. Read more
Related: The Police Killing of Sonya Massey Argues for Alternatives to Reform. By Tahir Duckett / NYT
Political / Social
Kamala Harris Should Tell Her Family’s Story. By Jay Caspian Kang / The New Yorker (Image WSJ)
The tale of two immigrants who found opportunity in America is an inspiring one. On the rare occasions that Harris shares it, her sometimes blurry identity comes into focus.
She should tell the story of her mother, a scientist who graduated from college at the age of nineteen in India and who came to the U.S. alone because she saw great opportunity in this country. She should talk about how that bright young woman fell in love with a rising Black academic, and, after the marriage ended, when Kamala was around seven years old, she raised her daughters in the activist community of the East Bay. Read more
Related: The Lesser-Known Side of Harris’s Identity: Asian American. By Amy Qin / NYT
Related: We’re Asking the Wrong Question About Harris and Race. By John McWhorter / NYT
Kamala Harris Isn’t Going Back. By Jelani Cobb / The New Yorker
Fifty years after Shirley Chisholm ran for the Presidency, we find ourselves yet again questioning the durability of outmoded presumptions about race and gender.
Fifty-two years later, Kamala Harris’s ascent to being the presumptive nominee of the Democratic Party represents, on many levels, a sharp contrast to Chisholm’s story. (Harris, during her 2020 Presidential run, nodded to her predecessor’s significance by incorporating a color scheme and typography similar to Chisholm’s 1972 campaign materials into her own.) Chisholm waged a shoestring effort, using her own savings to keep her campaign afloat; for Harris, word of President Joe Biden’s exit from the race unleashed a torrent of cash to support her candidacy. Read more
Related: Republicans accusing Kamala Harris of being a DEI hire should be careful. By Jeff Mayhugh / The Hill
How Harris, Trump have differences far beyond the political spectrum. By Jim Sergent and George Petras / USA Today
The former prosecutor versus the convicted felon is the latest twist in the 2024 presidential election.
Kamala Harris, the presumptive Democratic candidate, is using her prosecutor’s background to campaign against businessman and former President Donald Trump, who has been found guilty on 34 felony counts of falsifying business records. Since President Joe Biden withdrew from the 2024 race, American voters now face an unusual choice between two candidates who are almost diametric opposites – people who are different in nearly every way. USA TODAY measured some of the differences and charted what we found: Read more
Related: Fearing a Trump takeover, Justice Department alumni endorse Kamala Harris. By and
J.D. Vance Told Transgender Friend Sofia Nelson ‘I Love You’ and ‘I Hate Cops.’ By Hough Dougherty
Sofia Nelson, a transgender former friend of Vance for a decade, has released a dossier of emails and texts painting him in a new light.
J.D. Vance’s long correspondence with a transgender friend who attended his wedding has been revealed—including how he spoke about hating cops and disparaged Donald Trump and conservative icon Antonin Scalia. Sofia Nelson, a Yale Law School contemporary of Trump’s running mate, revealed how they corresponded by text and email for years until falling out over his support for a ban on gender-affirming medical treatment for minors. Read more
Related: JD Vance, an Unlikely Friendship and Why It Ended. Stephanie Saul / NYT
The man who set the stage for an imperial presidency if Trump wins. By Dennis Aftergut / Salon
A look at Leonard Leo’s American theocracy
Weeks after the extremist Supreme Court majority drove a truck over the rule of law in Trump v. United States, and with all that has happened since, friends still ask, “How do you explain this decision? How could these Republican-appointed justices do something like this?” For the answers, pay attention to Leonard Leo. He is the judicial kingmaker responsible for the list from which Trump selected Justices Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh and Amy Coney Barrett. Leo has shaped this Court and acted effectively to keep its Republican justices from abandoning his – and their – sectarian-right vision of America. Read more
How Some States Are Making It Harder to Register Voters. By Michael Wines / NYT
Florida and some other states have put restrictions on voter registration drives, often with stiff fines that are dissuading some civic groups from taking part. LaVon Bracy has been registering Florida voters ever since Lyndon Johnson signed the 1965 Voting Rights Act.
In an average year, she said, the nonprofit Faith in Florida, where she serves as democracy director, used to add 12,000 new voters to the state’s rolls. That ended last year, when Gov. Ron DeSantis signed legislation that imposed tough new rules on voter registration drives in the name of stopping fraud — and made voter registration groups that break the rules liable for fines as high as $250,000. Read more
Companies Slashing DEI Policies Face Long-Term Impacts. By Lisa Conn / Forbes
In a company statement released in late June, Tractor Supply — a staple across rural America known for supplying agricultural equipment — told customers that they were recommitting to their mission of “being good neighbors in our hometowns” and “representing the values of our communities and customers.”
To that end, the company provided a long list of activities they would no longer take part in, ranging from withdrawing from carbon emissions goals to declining to sponsor Pride events. The statement also noted, “[We will] eliminate DEI roles and retire our current DEI goals.” Meanwhile, the National Black Farmers Association has called on Tractor Supply CEO Hal Lawton to resign, with NBFA president John Boyd calling the statement “appalling,” adding, “it directly impacts our 130,000 members, many of whom are loyal Tractor Supply customers.” Read more
Georgia To Allow Funding For AP Black Studies After Outrage. By Bilal G. Morris / Newsone
A Georgia State superintendent has changed his tune and will allow the state to pay districts to teach a new AP course in Black Studies.
Superintendent Richard Woods originally said districts could only teach the course using local funds. But, amid growing outrage, the Georgia Department of Education says the state will pay for districts to teach the course as long as districts use a state-approved course in Black studies, During a rally on Wednesday, democrats called out Woods, blaming him for trying to keep students ignorant of Georgia’s messy history when it comes to race. Read more
Poor Black Kids Are Doing Better. Poor White Kids Are Doing Worse. By Annie Lowry / The Atlantic
A major study reports good and bad news.
The yawning gap between the mobility of white children and Black children growing up in low-income families has narrowed sharply, according to a major new study released today, based on tens of millions of anonymized census and tax records. Yet the findings are not entirely comforting. Inequality narrowed not just because poor Black kids have grown up to earn more as adults but also because poor white kids are earning less. Read more
World News
What a gang attack in a rural Haiti town says about the Kenya-led security mission. By Jacqueline Charles / Miami Herald
Ganthier, a rural community 28 miles east of Port-au-Prince and 14 miles from the Dominican Republic border, was among the last holdouts from gang control in Haiti
On Thursday, as Ganthier found itself on the verge of a full-blown gang take-over, Haitian police, joined by Kenyan officers who are part of the Multinational Security Support mission, launched an offensive. After weeks of planning, meetings and joint patrols to familiarize the foreign forces with Port-au-Prince’s dizzying landscape, the first major attempt to take down a gang and regain control during an active attack was underway. Read more
Russia wary of U.S. and France election surprises, especially Kamala Harris. By Catherine Belton / Wash Post
Harris, largely unknown to the Russians, is viewed with alarm.
When President Biden said he was dropping his reelection bid, the sudden upheaval in U.S. politics came as a blow for many in the Russian elite who closely track relations between Moscow and the West. Biden’s withdrawal in favor of Vice President Harris has upended a race that the Kremlin and its backers believed Donald Trump could win, creating “a window of opportunity” to settle the war in Ukraine on Russia’s aggressive, expansionist terms, according to analysts and current and former Russian officials. Read more
Harris Offers Support for Israel but Calls Out Palestinians’ Plight After Talk With Netanyahu. By Peter Baker / NYT
A meeting with the Israeli prime minister amounted to a debut on the world stage for the vice president since her rapid ascension as the presumptive Democratic nominee for president.
Vice President Kamala Harris offered Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu strong support for Israel’s right to defend itself from terrorism on Thursday but declared that “far too many innocent civilians” had died in Gaza and that “I will not be silent” about their suffering. Read more
Ethics / Morality / Religion
The shared root of antisemitism and White supremacy: A review of Christian Supremacy. By Kathryn Julian / The Christian Century
Historian Magda Teter identifies an endemic rot at the center of Christianity.
Magda Teter’s Christian Supremacy provides a timely answer to precisely this question. Her book enters a growing conversation about White supremacy and Christianity—not just their intersections but the inextricable communion of Christian religion with racism—at an important moment. She draws on a wealth of sources, including theology, legal treatises, and visual culture, to chart how the subordination of Jews became structural and contributed to European ideas of Christian domination. Read more
Trump Exploits Christians. By Kermit Zarley / Patheos
Donald Trump—the former U.S. president and now Republican nominee for the presidential election in November—spoke at a political rally in West Palm Beach, Florida Friday in which he told Christians to vote for him so he could become a lifetime dictator by overthrowing the U.S. Constitution.
Trump hammered his constant lie that the 2020 presidential election had been stolen from him due to voter fraud and then said, “Christians, get out and vote. Just this time. You won’t have to do it anymore,” insinuating that he will overcome the stipulation in the U.S. Constitution which limits presidents to two terms. Read more
Related: Trump is scrambling to find his religion again. By Chauncey Devega / Salon
Kamala Harris’ heritage draws attention to Hinduism’s complex history in Caribbean. By Richa Karmarkar / RNS
Indo-Caribbeans in the 19th century celebrating the Indian culture in West Indies through dance and music on an estate in Trinidad and Tobago. (Image courtesy of Wikipedia/Creative Commons)
A standard feature in any biography of Kamala Harris is the fact her parents — one a Hindu from India, the other a Baptist from Jamaica — met at the University of California, Berkeley, where they were both students in the 1960s. In this sense the vice president and presumptive Democratic nominee embodies a heritage shared by millions across the Caribbean basin and the Afro-Caribbean diaspora, many of whom are now talking about the sudden possibility that the next U.S. president could be of Indian and Jamaican heritage, and a person who claims to “know the lyrics to nearly every Bob Marley song” to this day. Read more
Related: How Kamala Harris and JD Vance appeal to Hindu voters. By Murali Balaji / RNS
J. D. Vance’s Radical Religion. By Paul Elie / The New Yorker
How might the Republican V.P. nominee’s conversion to conservative Catholicism influence his political world view?
For now, Vance’s presence on the ticket represents the union of Trumpism and a movement that sees Catholicism as the embodiment of tradition, stability, and a top-down ordering of society, which would be enshrined through regime change. That’s a lot of symbolism to lay on a commitment of faith that a thirty-nine-year-old man made just five years ago, but Vance’s embrace of Catholicism is deeply bound up with his stated belief that religion has the power to shape the country. Read more
Haitian American megachurch, 10 years in the making, opens $60 million campus in Miami. By Lauren Costantino / Miami Herald
After almost 20 years of conducting services out of homes, banks and local high schools, a multilingual Miami church finally has a place to call home.
Tabernacle of Glory, a nondenominational church with a prominent Haitian American congregation, opened a new $60 million campus in northern Miami-Dade County earlier this month. The 60,000 square-foot church, which sits on a six-acre lot on Northwest 161st Street and Third Avenue, will serve as a headquarters for Tabernacle’s 62 campuses, about half of which are located in Haiti. Other locations are found in parts of the U.S., Canada, the Dominican Republic, France, French Guiana and Chile. Read more
Historical / Cultural
New Richmond institute to examine how slavery helped build modern America. By Gregory S. Schneider / Wash Post
The Shockoe Institute will study Virginia’s role in the slave trade and related issues that linger today, as Richmond confronts a long-neglected history. Marland Buckner is head of the Shockoe Institute.
James Baldwin taught us that identities can help us to locate ourselves. But they trap us too. By Kenan Malik / The Guardian
James Baldwin was about 10 when he first read Charles Dickens’s A Tale of Two Cities. The character in the novel that most spoke to him was not the virtuous aristocrat Charles Darnay or Sydney Carton, the dissolute lawyer turned hero, but Thérèse Defarge, a woman brimming with hate, sitting in the shadow of the guillotine, knitting as the heads rolled.
“I recognised that unrelenting hatred,” Baldwin later wrote in his book-length essay The Devil Finds Work, “for it was all up and down my streets”. Those streets were the streets of Harlem, and the hatred was born out of the racism and poverty that encased the lives of those who lived there. Read more
From Obama to Harris, a look at what’s changed. By Leah Donnella / NPR Podcast
Travel back in time with me for a moment, won’t you? The year is 2008. Barack Obama has just received the Democratic nomination for president. The world is stunned. A Black man is running for the highest office in the country, and there’s a chance he could actually win. Many Americans never dreamed that this day would come, and regardless of how the election turns out, to them, Obama represents a new era – one defined by progress, change, and most of all, hope.
Not fifteen years later, the world is a different place. As Kamala Harris steps into the spotlight as the Democratic party’s newest presumptive nominee, the mood surrounding her candidacy seems decidedly less breathless. Harris, of course, would represent even more “firsts” than Obama – if elected, she would be the first Asian American in the Oval Office, the first Black woman – heck, the first woman of any background. Read more
‘Two American Families’ Is a Knockout Documentary. By Margaret Lyons / NYT
This latest installment in a long-term Frontline series is an intimate look at two American families, who work hard but struggle to make ends meet.
The Frontline documentary “Two American Families: 1991-2024,” arriving on Tuesday, follows two Milwaukee families, one Black, one white, over the last 30-odd years. “Families” is intimate and dignified, unwavering but gentle. At a time when so much documentary television feels generic, disposable and even straightforwardly pointless, this is both a master work unto itself and a glaring reminder of what is largely absent in television narrative nonfiction. Read more
‘Homicide: Life on the Street’ Will Finally Be Available to Stream. By Maya Salam / NYT
The celebrated 1990s police procedural is coming to Peacock in August. James Earl Jones, left, and Andre Braugher in “Homicide: Life on the Street.”
All seven seasons of the crime drama, which ran on NBC from 1993 to 1999, as well as the 2000 film “Homicide: The Movie,” which served as the series finale, will arrive on Peacock on Aug. 19. The show has been syndicated over the years and has been released on DVD, but its absence from streaming services — thanks largely to the challenge of securing music rights, a frequent sticking point in streaming deals — has long been lamented by fans. Read more
Sports
Simone Biles Is Finally Free. By Julie Kliegman / NYT
All the signs suggest Simone Biles is ready for it: to return to the Olympic stage and crush her new floor-routine mix that starts with a Taylor Swift song.
She almost certainly won’t be satisfied if she doesn’t add to her Olympic team and individual medal count — currently at seven — but regardless of what she accomplishes in Paris, it’s important to acknowledge that by returning at all, the 27-year-old gymnast has already won. Read more
Related: Simone Biles dominates Olympic qualifying round despite injury. By Emily Mae Czachor / CBS News
Snoop Dogg carries the Olympic torch before opening ceremony in Paris. By AP and ABC News
Snoop Dogg is seemingly everywhere during the Paris Olympics, but on Friday morning you could catch him carrying the Olympic torch ahead of the opening ceremony.
He was one of the final torch bearers of the Olympic flame, which was lit in April in Greece and slowly has journeyed toward Paris since. Snoop Dogg’s leg was in Saint-Denis, a suburb of Paris. In an interview earlier this week, the multihyphenate expressed gratitude toward the U.S. and France for the opportunity. Read more
Related: Olympic breaking is a testament to hip-hop’s seismic influence. By Char Adams / NBC News
Packers QB Jordan Love ties record for NFL’s highest-paid player with massive contract. By Nate Davis / USA Today
The Green Bay Packers are officially in Love.
Coming off a spectacular 2023 campaign, his debut as the Pack’s starting quarterback, Jordan Love is now tied for the title of NFL’s highest-paid player ever, agreeing Friday to a four-year, $220 million extension with $155 million guaranteed, a person with knowledge of the deal told Tom Silverstein of PackersNews and the USA TODAY Network. The person spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to disclose financial terms of the agreement. Read more
‘Inside the NBA’ memories: From ‘SNL’ spoofs to cookie storage, TNT show left its mark. By The Athletic Staff
Since 1989, “Inside the NBA” has been a constant in a frequently changing NBA broadcast landscape.
The league has gone from the NBA Finals airing on CBS when “Inside the NBA” debuted, to NBC throughout the 1990s and early 2000s, to ESPN and ABC over the last two decades. During that time, former players Kenny Smith (1998), Charles Barkley (2000) and Shaquille O’Neal (2011) joined Ernie Johnson on his postgame set to create appointment television for many basketball fans. But reality is setting in that the 2024-25 season likely will be the final one for “Inside the NBA” in its current form after the league on Wednesday announced new TV rights deals with ESPN, NBC and Amazon Prime Video, rejecting TNT Sports’ right to match. Read more
Amazon is building a sports media empire. What’s next? By Ben Strauss / Wash Post
Amazon now has the NFL and the NBA — and the power to transform pro sports.
A deal came together soon after the call, culminating in an announcement Wednesday that will have Amazon pay nearly $20 billion over 11 years for NBA and WNBA games, including six NBA conference finals, the annual playoff play-in tournament and three WNBA Finals. Suddenly, Amazon, already home to the NFL’s “Thursday Night Football,” is a major broadcaster of the two most popular North American leagues — with rights to playoff games in each. Read more
A new Tampa Bay Rays ballpark may honor the Black neighborhood the team once displaced. By AP and NBC News
Mayor Ken Welch says he’s prioritizing undoing historical wrongs by transforming the area Black residents were pushed out of during the ballpark’s original construction.
A key city council vote Thursday on a major redevelopment project in St. Petersburg, Florida, could pave the way to give baseball’s Tampa Bay Rays a new ballpark, which would guarantee the team stays for at least 30 years. The $6.5 billion project, supporters say, would transform an 86-acre tract in the city’s downtown, with plans in the coming years for a Black history museum, affordable housing, a hotel, green space, entertainment venues and office and retail space. There’s the promise of thousands of jobs as well. The site, where the Rays’ domed Tropicana Field and its expansive parking lots now sit, was once a thriving Black community driven out by construction of the ballpark and an interstate highway. Read more
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