Featured
Trump Tries to Use White South Africans as Cautionary Tale. By John Eligon / NYT
The president and his allies accuse South Africa of discriminating against and killing white people, and warn that it could happen in America if attempts to promote diversity aren’t stopped. White South Africans rallying in support of President Trump outside the U.S. Embassy in Pretoria, South Africa, last month.
The data tell a different story. Although white people make up 7 percent of the country’s population, they own at least half of South Africa’s land. Police statistics do not show that they are any more vulnerable to violent crime than other people. And white South Africans are far better off than Black people on virtually every marker of the economic scale. Yet Mr. Trump and his allies have pushed their own narrative of South Africa to press an argument at home: If the United States doesn’t clamp down on attempts to promote diversity, America will become a hotbed of dysfunction and anti-white discrimination. Read more
Related: Why Trump Is Right to View South Africa as a Threat. By Susan Neiman / The Nation
Political / Social
‘Guess what? You don’t matter’: what Trump’s war on DEI means for every American who’s not a straight white man. By Arwa Mahdawi / The Guardian
The US government’s move to abolish diversity, equity and inclusion policies is a naked attempt to appeal to prejudice – but it may well backfire
Trump’s second term has become a crusade against DEI. Hours into his presidency, he signed two executive orders targeting “radical and wasteful” DEI programmes. If a federal initiative has anything remotely to do with the issue, Trump has decreed that it must be eliminated. Read more
Related: Appeals Court Lets Trump’s Diversity Crackdown Proceed. By Chris Cameron / NYT
Related: Hollywood’s DEI Retreat Is a Box Office Bomb Waiting to Happen. By Malcolm Venable / BET
Trump’s Attempts to Muzzle the Press Look Familiar. By András Pethő / The Atlantic
Much of what the U.S. president has done to curb independent media echoes the Hungarian autocrat Viktor Orbán’s playbook.
When Viktor Orbán gave a speech in 2022 at a Conservative Political Action Conference gathering in Budapest, he shared his secret to amassing power with Donald Trump’s fan base. “We must have our own media,” he told his audience. As a Hungarian investigative journalist, I have had a firsthand view of how Orbán has built his own media universe while simultaneously placing a stranglehold on the independent press. Read more
Related: Trump’s ad hoc presidency is destroying the economy — and a lot more. By Dana Milbank / Wash Post
Federal Spending Bill Contains Bitter Medicine for Black Americans. by
Black federal workers narrowly averted being furloughed in a government shutdown, but face deep cuts to the federal budget, impacting workforce training and treatment for substance abuse and mental health.
Ten Senate Democrats joined Republicans on Friday to pass a funding bill and narrowly avert a federal government shutdown, just hours before the deadline. The outcome saved Black Americans — who are overrepresented among federal workers — from bearing the brunt of the furloughs, diminished services, and general chaos that likely would have ensued during a shutdown. But the funding bill that Congress adopted also contains some bitter medicine for Black America. Read more
Republicans Tear Down a Black Lives Matter Mural. By Clint Smith / The Atlantic
The city-sanctioned mural had been created in 2020, after the Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin killed George Floyd by kneeling on his neck for more than nine minutes. Floyd’s death catalyzed racial-justice protests nationwide, including in Washington.
But a few weeks ago, Republican Representative Andrew Clyde of Georgia introduced legislation that would withhold millions of dollars in federal funding from the city if it did not remove the mural and change the name of the area to “Liberty Plaza.” “The mural inspired millions of people and helped our city through a very painful period, but now we can’t afford to be distracted by meaningless congressional interference,” Bowser wrote in a post on X. Read more
Don’t Fool Yourself Into Thinking It Will Stop With Columbia. By David French / NYT
Columbia University is now the epicenter of the American culture war. The Trump administration is targeting a former Columbia student — and the university itself — as a test case for its new authoritarian regime.
In an interview with NPR, Troy Edgar, the deputy secretary of the Department of Homeland Security, made it clear that the administration was targeting Khalil’s expression. “We’ve invited and allowed the student to come into the country,” Edgar said, “and he’s put himself in the middle of the process of basically pro-Palestinian activity. And at this point, like I said, the secretary of state can review his visa process at any point and revoke it.” Read more
Related: Jewish Americans Are Sick Of Trump Exploiting Them. By Sanjana Karanth / HuffPost
World News
Does Trump Want America to Look More Like Saudi Arabia?
We might think of Mr. Trump’s vision as an attempt to transplant the political economy of Saudi Arabia onto the United States.
The Trumpist project is not about “Making America Great Again” in any traditional sense; rather, it is about reshaping America at least in part in the image of a modern petrostate — one that leverages energy wealth, luxury development and financial capital to exert influence on the global stage. Read more
The Arab plan for Gaza should be taken seriously. By The Editorial Board / Wash Post
Israel and the United States have rejected it, but it’s the only realistic option on the table.
Arab League leaders meeting in Cairo last week endorsed a realistic plan put forward by Egyptian President Abdel Fatah El-Sisi for a multiyear reconstruction of Gaza that would leave Palestinian residents in their homeland and commit the wealthy Arab countries to paying most of the rebuilding costs. The Arab plan envisions a rebuilding effort in three phases. Read more
I Went to Dubai, and Caught a Glimpse of the Future. By Lydia Polgreen / NYT
In our current age of vituperative anti-immigration politics, Western leaders seem to assume that the best and brightest people from poorer countries will always want to build their lives in the West. Laureen Fredah in her office in Dubai.
But this attitude fails to understand the experiences of people like Fredah, who 15 years ago joined a relatively new tide of educated, middle- and upper-middle-class people from Africa, Latin America, Asia and the wider Middle East who have flocked to the Persian Gulf in search of opportunity. Read more
Ethics / Morality / Religion
Rev. Dr. Carter’s BYU lecture on nonviolence, peace and human rights. By Rachel Sterzer Gibson / Church News
In lecture at BYU, Rev. Lawrence E. Carter invites campus to be co-creators in the sustainable, global ‘beloved community’ of MLK
The world today is witnessing an absence of peace, noted the Rev. Lawrence Edward Carter. This absence of peace is manifest in everything from individuals launching verbal attacks face to face and over social media to nation states launching bombs and missiles across borders, said Rev. Carter, senior professor and founding dean of the Martin Luther King Jr. International Chapel at Morehouse College. “From this dark mood, where we can turn for help?” Rev. Carter asked during a presentation in the Hinckley Center on the Brigham Young University campus in Provo, Utah, on Thursday, March 13. “I believe Dr. King offers a model, which he conceived more than 60 years ago, that can still serve us today.” Read more
The Share of Religious Americans Will Continue to Decline. By Jessica Grose / NYT
Pew Research’s Religious Landscape Study polled more than 35,000 Americans. According to Pew, since 2007, the share of Americans who describe themselves as Christian has dropped to 63 percent from 78 percent.
The move away from organized religion among younger people isn’t just with their feet — it goes much deeper than church attendance. A new book, “Why Religion Went Obsolete: The Demise of Traditional Faith in America,” by Christian Smith argues that millennials created a “new zeitgeist” where religion is much less important to their overall worldview than it was to previous generations. Read more
Bishop George Edward Battle Jr., long-serving AME Zion Church leader, dies at 77. By Adelle M. Banks / RNS
‘Having served as an active Bishop for 29 years, Bishop George Edward Battle Jr. will take his place in history as one of our longest-serving active bishops,’ said AME Zion Church’s board of bishops
“He was not only an evangelist, pastor, bishop and Christian servant, he was a great philanthropist, a community leader, a champion for education and a social justice advocate.” Battle retired in 2021. In one of his last acts as AME Zion Church’s senior bishop, he oversaw a mortgage-burning ceremony to celebrate the historically Black denomination paying off its debts. The denomination dates back to 1796 and is headquartered in Charlotte. Read more
Historical / Cultural
D.C. Museum Exhibit Illuminates the Brutalities of Slavery. By Ronald Bailey / Reason
The “In Slavery’s Wake” exhibit celebrates black Americans’ resistance to slavery and Jim Crow.
The National Museum of African American History and Culture illuminates the brutalities of slavery and Jim Crow while also celebrating black Americans’ political, intellectual, and cultural achievements. The D.C. museum is currently featuring “In Slavery’s Wake: Making Black Freedom in the World,” running until June 8 before traveling the globe. Read more
Related: The way we remember slavery is changing. One city is taking the lead. By Petula Dvorak / Wash Post
History Of The ‘Freedom’s Journal’ The 1st Black Newspaper. By Shannon Dawson / Newsone
The struggle for equality and civil rights has been a long and hard-fought battle in the United States. However, one of the most powerful tools used to amplify the voices of African Americans in the early 19th century was the press.
Among the first and most influential publications dedicated to giving voice to the African American experience was Freedom’s Journal, founded on March 16, 1827. It was the first newspaper owned and operated by African Americans. Its creation and impact marked a pivotal moment in the history of Black journalism and civil rights. Read more
The Rise of Brown v. Board of Education Skeptics. By Justin Driver / The Atlantic
Why some mainstream Black intellectuals are giving up on the landmark decision
In the 2000s, as Brown crept toward its 50th anniversary, Derrick Bell of the NYU School of Law went so far as to allege that the opinion had been wrongly decided. For Bell, who had sharpened his skills as an LDF lawyer, Brown’s “integration ethic centralizes whiteness. White bodies are represented as somehow exuding an intrinsic value that percolates into the ‘hearts and minds’ of black children.” Read more
Forts Bragg and Benning revert to old names with new honorees, sparking controversy. By Jim Axelrod / CBS News
Fayetteville, North Carolina — For the second time in less than two years, the largest U.S. military base has a new name — but the new name is also its old name.
For more than a century, North Carolina’s Fort Bragg honored Confederate Gen. Braxton Bragg. In 2023, it was changed to Fort Liberty by a congressionally mandated commission to rename nine bases that honored Confederate generals. After President Trump took office, the Pentagon changed the name back to Fort Bragg last month, but honoring a different Bragg than the original. Under Hegseth’s leadership, Fort Moore is now reverting back to Fort Benning — not after the Confederate general it originally honored, but Cpl. Fred Benning — who served with honor for a couple of years during World War I. Read More
Strange Horizons – The Dark Delight of Being Strange by James B. Haile III. Reviewed By Ian J. Simpson / Strange Horizons
This short story collection by James B. Haile III—an associate professor of philosophy at the University of Rhode Island—is part exploration of the speculative fiction genre and part treatise on Black identity.
It is completely fascinating in terms of structure and presentation, content and concept. It made me think deeply about race and identity. It also meant a fair bit of research along my reading journey. Read more
Sports
Serena Williams’ return to Indian Wells after 14-year tennis boycott: ‘Her family had been vindicated.’ By Matthew Futterman / The Athletic
Venus and her father entered the stadium and walked to the player’s box beside the court. The boos rained down once more. Richard told USA Today that he heard people in the crowd use the N-word, too. He raised his fist to the crowd in a Black Power salute. And then he watched as his daughter won the match 4-6, 6-4, 6-2 and then vowed never to return.
In the first years of the boycott, the organizers of Indian Wells gave the Williams sisters space. As years passed, they began to reach out to representatives of the sisters and the family to see if a detente might be possible, according to people who served as intermediaries in those discussions. At the conclusion of the 2015 Australian Open, which she won, Williams wrote an article in Time Magazine in which she announced her return to Indian Wells. Read more
Steph Curry’s journey to 4,000 NBA 3-pointers is one nobody ever saw coming. By Sam Amick / NYT
The Sacramento Kings aren’t alone in their Steph Curry misery.
Back in 2009, when the Golden State legend was a sinewy, sharpshooting prospect from Davidson who never could have imagined draining 4,000 3-pointers in his NBA life, the Kings were one of five teams that passed on the babyfaced assassin in the draft before he went No. 7 to the Warriors. The Minnesota Timberwolves, infamously, declined his services twice with the fifth and sixth picks while opting instead for Ricky Rubio and Jonny Flynn. Read more
Shedeur Sanders’ confidence at the NFL combine rubbed some the wrong way. It shouldn’t have. By Justin Tinsley / Andscape
The reaction to Sanders’ appearance highlights a longtime fear of Black confidence.
The conversation around Sanders during the combine revolved around his character. A quarterback coach of a team drafting in the top-seven picks viewed Sanders as “brash” and “arrogant” and, according to veteran NFL reporter Josina Anderson, told multiple people around the league that Sanders’ demeanor was a reason to perhaps refrain from drafting him. Read more
LeBron James and the Limits of Nepotism. By Ross Andersen / The Atlantic
It’s embarrassing for everyone involved.
LeBron has himself to blame for the sad media spectacle of Bronny’s first season. In the months leading up to last year’s NBA draft, Bronny told reporters that it was his life’s great dream to be drafted by a pro team, any team. In off-the-record interviews, league executives made clear that because Bronny does not have his dad’s skill or size, he wasn’t all that draftable. In his short career at the University of Southern California, which was interrupted by a scary incident of cardiac arrest, he averaged only 5 points a game. By all appearances, it was LeBron who made sure Bronny got drafted. Read more
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