Featured
Tucker Carlson, the Chauvin verdict and the burden of “white civilization.” By Chauncey Devega / Salon
On a near-nightly basis, Fox News primetime host Tucker Carlson conducts master classes in white supremacy and hate for his millions of viewers, nearly all of them white conservatives. His latest lesson involves the paranoid fiction that nonwhite people are coming to America to “replace” the majority white population, and that by implication the existence of the “white race” is imperiled both in the United States and around the world. Read more
Political / Social
Biden’s $1.8 trillion American Families Plan ramps up child care, student aid funding, and more. By
Related: Republicans Are Risking a Major Realignment. By Mark Green / The Nation
FBI Opens Probe into Police Killing of Andrew Brown as Autopsy Confirms He Was Shot in Back of Head. By Democracy Now
The FBI has opened a civil rights investigation into the police killing of Andrew Brown Jr. in Elizabeth City, North Carolina. An independent autopsy confirms Brown, a 42-year-old Black man, was shot five times by police, including in the back of the head. Brown’s family and their lawyers have only been allowed to see a 20-second video of the killing from a single body camera, which shows Brown had his hands on the steering wheel of his car when he was shot dead. Read more
3 Indicted On Federal Hate Crime Charges In Ahmaud Arbery Death. By Ryan J. Reilly / HuffPost
A federal grand jury in Georgia indicted three men Wednesday in connection with the killing of Ahmaud Arbery, a Black man who was shot while jogging in Georgia last year. Travis McMichael, Gregory McMichael and William “Roddie” Bryan each face a hate crime charge and a charge of attempted kidnapping. These are separate from state charges brought against the three men last year over the February 2020 killing. Read more
The problems with policing are vast. Ending qualified immunity should be just the start. By Deborah D. Douglas / Wash Post
President Biden is putting his money on the George Floyd Justice in Policing Act. Among its reforms would be an overhaul of qualified immunity — laws that shield far, far too many police officers from prosecution, nurturing a sense of law enforcement impunity. The bill has passed the House but needs Senate support to become law. Maybe Senate Republicans can be shamed by recent events into voting for it. Maybe. Read more
Newark cops, with reform, didn’t fire a single shot in 2020. By Tom Moran /Star Ledger Editorial Board
Newark Police officers did not fire a single shot during the calendar year 2020, and the city didn’t pay a single dime to settle police brutality cases. That’s never happened, at least in the city’s modern history. At the same time, crime is dropping, and police recovered almost 500 illegal guns from the street during the year. Read more
Related: Split-Second Decisions: How a Supreme Court Case Shaped Modern Policing. /NYT
Thanks to DeSantis’ fascist policies, civil-rights lawyers have their hands full in Florida. By Fabiola Santiago / Miami Herald
A civil-rights fight looms in Florida courts — and not a minute too soon. Hurrah to the civil-rights lawyers who filed a lawsuit in federal court in Orlando this week to challenge a newly enacted law that runs roughshod over people’s right to protest. They’re needed here before it’s too late, and Confederate-friendly Floriduh finds a way to secede from the Union. Read more
Related: Florida’s new ‘anti-riot’ law benefits one person: Ron DeSantis. By Lizette Alvarez / Wash Post
Republican-led legislatures push forward with efforts to restrict voting access. By Fredreka Schouten / CNN
Republican-controlled legislatures are charging forward with a raft of new state laws imposing limits on voting. GOP lawmakers in Montana recently passed new voting restrictions. And GOP legislators in Florida, Arizona and Texas soon could follow — as Republicans scramble to change the ground rules for future elections. “It’s continuing full-speed ahead on this nationwide trend by state legislators to restrict voting access,” said Jonathan Diaz, legal counsel for voting rights at the nonpartisan Campaign Legal Center. Read more
Related: Texas Republicans are takin voter suppression to the next level. By Charlotte Klein / Vanity Fair
Gun crazy: For too many Americans, guns are tied to masculinity, patriotism and white power. By Chauncey Devega / Salon
Too many Americans love guns more than they do other human beings. There have been at least 50 mass shootings in America since the massacre and apparent hate crime attack against Asian Americans in the Atlanta area on March 16. In response to discussions about an assault weapons ban after the mass shootings in Atlanta and Boulder, Sen. Lindsey Graham told Fox News’ Chris Wallace, “If there’s a natural disaster in South Carolina where the cops can’t protect my neighborhood, my house will be the last ones that the gangs will come to, because I can defend myself.” The next day, Graham circulated a video of himself shooting an AR-15 assault rifle at a South Carolina gun range. Read more
Homeland Security Will Assess How It Identifies Extremism in Its Ranks. / NYT
The Department of Homeland Security will undergo an internal review to root out white supremacy and extremism in its ranks as part of a larger effort to combat extremist ideology in the federal government, officials said on Monday. The task of identifying extremists throughout the United States, and specifically in government agencies, has come to the top of President Biden’s agenda since Jan. 6, when a pro-Trump mob stormed the U.S. Capitol. Many of the rioters were found to be members of extremist groups. Read more
Want to Fix the Racial Wealth Gap? Start By Canceling Student Debt. By Sabrina Calazans / The Nation
Latinx borrowers with loans are already more likely than other racial groups to postpone making life-changing decisions, such as getting married and having a family. Instead, they are forced to put their lives and dreams on hold, starting a cycle that contributes to the ever-increasing racial wealth gap, where the median net worth of white families is about eight times that of Hispanic families. Read more
Related: Biden wants to fight racist exclusionary zoning laws. Will it work? By Nicole Karlis / Salon
Her unlikely campaign for governor began at a gravesite in Virginia. By Petula Dvorak / Wash Post
‘Embarrassing Racist’: Native American Orgs Rip Santorum For Claiming There Was ‘Nothing’ Before Colonizers Arrived. By Cristina Cabrera /TPM
The leaders of organizations for Native Americans are raking CNN commentator Rick Santorum over the coals after he claimed that white European colonizers “birthed a nation from nothing” in America and that “there isn’t much Native American culture in American culture.” Fawn Sharp, president of the National Congress of American Indians (NCAI), ripped Santorum’s “caveman mentality” on Monday night and demanded that CNN fire the former GOP senator. Read more
Young Black Residents Are Bearing the Brunt of Michigan’s Recent COVID-19 Surge. By Edwin Rios and Sinduja Rangarajan / Mother Jones
Michigan is in the midst of a brutal surge of COVID-19 infections. ICUs are nearing capacity, and thousands of infections are hitting each day. The B.1.1.7 variant has driven this surge: The more transmissible variant accounts for 99 percent of new cases in the state. As the state races to vaccinate residents and reopen its economy and schools, it appears that, like the beginning of the pandemic, Black communities across generations are getting infected and dying of COVID at higher rates than their white peers, according to a Mother Jones analysis of state data. Likely because older residents received the early share of vaccinations, this surge has unevenly afflicted younger residents—young Black men and women in particular. Read more
The Black Farmer Movement Battling History to Return to the Land. By Molly Schwartz / Mother Jones
Agriculture was once a major source of wealth for Black American families. According to scholar Thomas Mitchell, by 1910, up to 80 percent of the Black middle and upper class owned farms. But over the course of a century, Black-owned farmland has diminished to the point of near extinction: Only 1.7 percent of farms were run by Black growers in 2017. “We’re looking at about 98 percent of farmland ownership being in white hands today, and that’s more racially skewed than it’s ever been before,” Farming While Black author Leah Penniman told Bite podcast last year. “I think it says a lot about this nation, the fact that all the arable land is concentrated into the hands of one demographic group.” Shown is Tahz Walker who stands on land that he and others own communally as part of Earthseed Land Collective in Durham, North Carolina on March 14, 2021. Read more
Morehouse leaves debate tournament following anti-Black mockery. By Parker Owens / The Undefeated
The Morehouse College debate team has experienced much success over the years. It was a finalist in the 2015 United States Universities Debating Championship (USUDC), which is the national championship for the British Parliamentary style of debate. And its A-team of senior Daniel Edwards and sophomore Caleb Strickland won tournaments at Vanderbilt, the Social Justice Debates national championship and reached the finals of the Western States Debating Championships. But at the Penn USUDC 2021 earlier this month, Edwards and Strickland were subjected to racist taunts from opposing teams and felt compelled to withdraw from the tournament. Read more
Historical / Cultural
’The Blinding of Isaac Woodard’: Black World War II veteran fueled civil rights movement. By DeNeen L. Brown
Georgia park with giant Confederate carving proposes changes. By Sudhin Thanawala / AP and ABC News
Remembering Hubert Harrison, the Father of Harlem Radicalism. By Jeffrey B. Perry / AAIHS
Hubert Harrison (April 27, 1883-December 17, 1927) was a brilliant writer, orator, educator, critic, and radical political activist. Historian Joel A. Rogers, in World’s Great Men of Color, described him as “perhaps the foremost Afro-American intellect of his time,” and civil rights and labor leader A. Philip Randolph, described him as “the father of Harlem Radicalism.” Read more
The Craft of John Edgar Wideman. By Elias Rodriques / The Nation
A conversation with one of the greatest living Black American writers on work, life, and why good fiction is like a game of basketball.
The surprising source Cynthia Erivo found to understand Aretha Franklin. By Yvonne Villarreal / LA Times
As an actor and singer, Cynthia Erivo knows how to command a stage. But to do so as someone else — someone like Aretha Franklin, the Queen of Soul — can be a peculiar feeling. It made preparation all the more key for Erivo as she took on the role of the powerhouse singer in “Genius: Aretha,” the National Geographic series chronicling Franklin’s life and work. Erivo says she relied heavily on Franklin’s media interviews and appearances, including a 1976 conversation with Dick Clark on “American Bandstand” to promote her album “Sparkle.” Erivo picked up the nuances of Franklin’s personality by paying close attention to how the singer would interact with a person she didn’t know well. Read more
At a subdued but innovative Oscar ceremony, Hollywood affirms a message of inclusion. By Paul Farhi / Wash Post
On a night when best director and best picture went to Chloé Zhao for her film “Nomadland,” the event highlighted an unprecedented number of films produced by and starring people of color. The sponsoring Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences also sought to reimagine the annual TV show — threatened by years of declining audiences — to avoid the Zoom-induced chilliness and technical glitches that have cratered the ratings of other live award programs for the past year. Read more
Related: Tyler Perry receives Jean Hersholt Humanitarian Award. By Hayley FitzaPatrick / ABC News
Sports
Fifty years ago, Curt Flood walked away from the Senators. He left baseball forever changed. By Chelsea Janes / Wash Post
Fifty years ago today, the Washington Senators’ center fielder disappeared. He was 33 years old at the time, winner of seven consecutive Gold Gloves, a two-time World Series champion and Bob Gibson’s best friend. He could have had years of good baseball left in him, had many things been different. The man who sued baseball because he felt players should not play their careers locked to one team had summoned a media storm when he wrote Commissioner Bowie Kuhn in the winter of 1969 requesting that he become a free agent rather than report to Philadelphia after the St. Louis Cardinals traded him there. Read more
There were the Negro Leagues, and then there were the Black Fives. By Ade D. Adeniji / CBS News
The Alphas, the Savoy Big Five, the Second Story Morrys, and dozens of other hoops teams thrived during the Black Fives Era – a period of basketball before the NBA launched in 1946 and became integrated four years later. “Fives” is a reference to the five starting players in basketball. Barred from the Whites-only gymnasiums and athletic clubs, Black Fives teams played in church basements, armories, meeting halls and dance ballrooms. Rather than just isolated basketball games, these bonafide events also involved music and dance before and after games during an age of jazz — a celebration that sounds like NBA All-Star Weekend. Read more
Carmouche to be 1st Black jockey in Kentucky Derby since 2013. By AP and NBC News
Long before Kendrick Carmouche started riding horses growing up in Louisiana, Black jockeys were synonymous with the sport. Black riders were atop 13 of the 15 horses in the first Kentucky Derby in 1875 and won 15 of the first 28 editions of the race. Everything has changed since: Carmouche on Saturday will be the first Black jockey in the Kentucky Derby since 2013 and is just one of a handful over the past century. Read more
Justin Fields and the double standard of Black quarterback prospects. By Martenzie Johnson / The Undefeated
Justin Fields will be one of the first five quarterbacks taken in the draft. But the fact that he started the college season as the consensus No. 2 quarterback prospect, before inexplicably dropping as low as the fifth quarterback at times in some mock drafts – behind two white players with lesser pedigrees – is an indictment of an antiquated system as it pertains to Black quarterbacks. Read more
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