Featured
What if White people woke up with dark skin? Mohsin Hamid’s novel wonders. Review by Ron Charles / Wash Post
‘The Last White Man’ is a fantastical exploration of race and privilege
More than a century ago, Gregor Samsa woke from troubled dreams and found himself transformed into a monstrous insect. Mohsin Hamid’s new novel, “The Last White Man,” buzzes with an ironic allusion to that unsettling metamorphosis. In the opening sentence, a White man named Anders awakens one morning to discover that his skin has turned “a deep and undeniable brown.” Following Kafka’s lead, the cause of this sudden alteration remains unknown; its meaning is equally elusive. What follows sometimes feels like a curious thought experiment — or Tucker Carlson’s worst nightmare, a racist fever dream of “the great replacement theory.”
For a novel that explores the functions and presumptions of racism, “The Last White Man” is a peculiarly hopeful story. Its method may be fantastical speculation, but its faith eventually leads to the inevitability of social enlightenment. It anticipates that sweet day — not forever deferred, surely — when we finally close the casket on the whole horrific construct of racial hierarchies and see each other for what we are. Read more
Political / Social
Republicans Are Rooting for Civil War. By Mona Charen / The Bulwark
The distrust Trump sowed is bearing bitter fruit.
There may be less than meets the eye in those crates the FBI carted off from Mar-a-Lago on Monday. Or it could be a motherlode of incrimination. We don’t know, we can only speculate. But what is not open to doubt is that the Republican party, which seemed to be flirting with post-Trumpism just a few weeks ago, has now come roaring back as an authoritarian cult. Trump has not changed. But he has changed Republicans. Read more
Related: CPAC’s Four-Day Sermon of Unrelenting Fear Has Set Trumpism on a New Path. By Laura Jedeed / TNR
Welcome to Georgia, Where the Democrats’ Electoral Dreams Live or Die. By Kevin Lee / New Republic
For liberals, no state in the country feels more important in the November midterm elections than Georgia. Can Stacey Abrams and Raphael Warnock prevail?
Now Abrams is challenging Kemp, her former rival, in a state that in the 2022 contests may be more emotionally important to Democrats than any other. With democracy itself hanging in the balance, the stakes feel nothing less than dire. Around the nation, new redistricting and election laws, described by some Democrats as “Jim Crow 2.0,” have limited voter participation. Democrats hold a slim nine-seat advantage in the U.S. House and trail by two seats in the Senate, though a pair of independents often vote with them. Read more
Related: Stacey Abrams Explains Change Of Heart On Abortion. Marita Vlachou / HuffPost
Biden deserves kudos for diverse judges. But White men still dominate. By Jennifer Ruben / Wash Post
In less than two years into his first term, President Biden has successfully appointed an impressive 76 federal court judges. That means Biden, despite having a 50-50 Senate with no room for error, has confirmed more judges at this point in his presidency than each of his three predecessors. To put this into perspective, Trump nominated zero Black judges to the Supreme Court or circuit courts out of 56 appointments. As the report makes clear, the judiciary is so overwhelmingly male and White that it will take decades to reach anything approaching a fair reflection of the country. Thanks to Biden’s effort, “the percentage of Blacks on the federal bench rose slightly — from 9.5% in 2020 to 11% in 2022. . . . Meanwhile, 7.7% of federal judges in 2022 were Hispanic — up slightly from 6.5% in 2020.” Read more
Democrat Mandela Barnes set to challenge GOP Wisconsin Sen. Johnson. By Sara Burnett and Scott Bauer / PBS
Wisconsin Lt. Gov. Mandela Barnes won the Democratic Senate primary on Tuesday and will face two-term Republican Sen. Ron Johnson in what is expected to be one of the country’s most competitive races for control of the U.S. Senate. Barnes’ top rivals dropped out of the race late last month and backed the former legislator, a sign of Democrats’ intense focus on defeating Johnson, who is one of former President Donald Trump’s most vocal supporters. The Senate is currently split 50-50, with Democrats relying on the vice president to break ties, and the Wisconsin contest is one of the few races seen a toss-up in November. Read more
Two in Arbery Case Sentenced Again to Life in Prison; Third Man Gets 35 Years. By Richard Fausset / NYT
The men were convicted of federal hate crimes after state murder convictions in 2021. Their lawyers tried without success to have part of their sentences served in federal prison.
Before the three men convicted of murdering Ahmaud Arbery were sentenced on Monday on federal hate crime charges, they asked a judge to consider not only the length of the sentences, but also the location, with one lawyer arguing that if her client went straight to Georgia’s dangerous state prison system, he would be subject to “vigilante justice.” The men did not get what they asked for. Read more
Viral Video Of Black Man’s Violent Arrest In Mississippi Sparks Investigation. By Michael Goldberg / HuffPost
A white Mississippi Highway Patrol officer was seen on video putting a handcuffed Black man into a chokehold and wrestling him into a ditch.
The video shows one of Lewis’ brothers, Eugene Lewis, standing in the street in handcuffs as Packer Lewis and another brother, Darius Lewis, yell that they are recording the incident. Suddenly, the officer grabs Eugene Lewis by the neck and pulls him across the street, tackling him to the ground. At one point, the officer appears to use his knee to pin him down. Read and watch here
Family Of Anton Black, Who Died In Police Custody, Reaches $5 Million Partial Settlement. By Phillip Jackson / HuffPost
In a lawsuit comparing the case to that of George Floyd, the family accused area police and Maryland’s medical examiner of wrongdoing.
The family of Anton Black, a 19-year-old Black man from a rural town in Maryland who died in police custody in 2018, reached a $5 million partial settlement and an agreement for there to be institutional changes to three municipalities’ police departments. Black’s family filed a lawsuit in 2020, noting that George Floyd and Black had both died because police had pinned them to the ground and deprived them of oxygen. Read more
A grand jury declined to indict a woman whose accusations set off Emmett Till killing. By AP and NPR
A Mississippi grand jury has declined to indict the white woman whose accusation set off the lynching of Black teenager Emmett Till nearly 70 years ago, most likely closing the case that shocked a nation and galvanized the modern civil rights movement. After hearing more than seven hours of testimony from investigators and witnesses, a Leflore County grand jury last week determined there was insufficient evidence to indict Carolyn Bryant Donham on charges of kidnapping and manslaughter, Leflore County District Attorney Dewayne Richardson said in a news release Tuesday. Read more
American Sikhs are targets of bigotry, often due to cultural ignorance. By Simran Jeet Singh / The Conversation
Ten years ago, a white supremacist opened fire on a Sikh congregation in Oak Creek, Wisconsin, killing six people and injuring several others before taking his own life. An eighth person, Baba Punjab Singh, was left partially paralyzed and died from his wounds a few years later. At the time, it was among the deadliest mass shootings in a place of worship since the 16th Street Baptist Church bombing by the Ku Klux Klan in 1963. It was also the most lethal assault on Sikh Americans since they began migrating to the U.S. more than a century ago. Read more
Related: Killings of 4 Men in Albuquerque Leave Muslim Community in Fear. Neelam Bohra and
A Latina professor who was denied tenure at Harvard is demanding a ‘revolution’ in academia. By
“It was clearly wrong what happened,” Lorgia García-Peña said. “Everybody knew it.” She’s written a book about her experience as she urges academia to think bigger.
One of the country’s foremost ethnic studies scholars, who was denied tenure at Harvard in 2019 — prompting outrage from students and faculty nationwide and reigniting calls for more diversity at the school and in academia more broadly — has dissected the experience in depth for the first time in a new book. In “Community as Rebellion: A Syllabus for Surviving Academia as a Woman of Color,” Lorgia García-Peña provides details about the harassment and “institutional violence” she says she faced while navigating everyday life as a faculty member on the predominantly white campus. She also highlights the need for radical changes to make academia more accessible to scholars and students of color. Read more
Black, Native American and Latino families face serious problems from inflation. By Will Stone / NPR
Fears of eviction. Trouble affording groceries. Unmet medical needs.
A national poll — from NPR, the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation and the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health — finds those are all too common experiences for high proportions of Black, Latino and Native American adults as the U.S. weathers a grueling stretch of high prices and economic uncertainty. In fact, more than half of Black and Latino households report the recent price increases driven by inflation have caused them “serious financial problems.” It’s even higher among Native Americans, with that number rising to more than two-thirds of those surveyed. Read more
Related: The Black homeownership gap is widening. By Swapna Venugopal Ramaswamy / USA Today
Black Americans are now struggling with long Covid. By L’Oreal Thompson Payton / Fortune
Given that COVID-19 disproportionately impacted Black Americans at the onset of the global pandemic, it should come as no surprise that this community has also been hit hard by long COVID. According to a recent study, roughly 700,000 people in the U.S. have long COVID, defined as symptoms lasting longer than three weeks. Much like the initial outbreak of the coronavirus, long COVID has highlighted long-standing health inequities in the U.S., particularly in communities of color. Read more
Ethics / Morality / Religion
The Christian Case for Reading Black Classics. By Patricia Raybon / Christianity Today
Why James Baldwin, Toni Morrison, and other African American masters deserve an audience among all believers.
Claude Atcho was shopping at Target when a display of James Baldwin books got him thinking: Who would read them? Or get lost trying? At that moment, Atcho—a Charlottesville, Virginia, pastor who had taught African American literature at the collegiate level—was inspired to write a guide for Christians on reading and discussing Black classics (like Baldwin’s Go Tell It on the Mountain). The result, Reading Black Books: How African American Literature Can Make Our Faith More Whole and Just, applies a literary and theological lens to these classics. Journalist and mystery novelist Patricia Raybon spoke to Atcho about his invitation to readers. Read more
What Thomas Merton tells us about the Gospel’s logic vs. our society’s. By Daniel P. Horan / NCR
Having read, written, taught, led retreats and lectured on the writing of Thomas Merton for many years, I am used to encountering a range of responses people have to the late Trappist monk and spiritual writer’s work and wisdom. Generally speaking, those who have actually taken the time to learn about Merton — his fidelity to his Catholic faith, his openness to dialogue with other traditions, his keen social analysis and criticism, and the broad range of topics and thinkers he engaged throughout his tragically short life (1915-68) — are usually interested and inspired by his thought and writings. Read more
Utopia in Dark Times. By Victoria W. Wolcott / AAIHS
Mural in the Sherdavia Jenkins Peace Park in the Liberty City neighborhood of Miami, Florida, January 18, 2020 (Carrol M. Highsmith/ LOC)
In this turbulent historical moment, I find myself often reflecting on Octavia Butler’s 1993 novel Parable of the Sower . Butler set this novel in the early 2020s when climate change, rising violence, and economic inequality have created social chaos. Butler’s protagonist, Lauren Olamina, suffers from a form of hyperempathy, feeling the emotional and physical pain of those around her. However, this weakness gives her the insight to develop a new philosophy and religion, which she calls Earthseed. This new religion is based on the precept that “God is change,” and that humans have the ability to “shape God,” giving hope to those who were willing to act as agents of change. Read more
A Model for an Evangelical Christianity Committed to Justice. By Tish Harrison Warren / NYT
One night, feeling frustrated and cynical, I walked into a bookstore and stumbled on a book titled “Rich Christians in an Age of Hunger” by Ronald J. Sider, which argues that vast global wealth inequality is a moral failure resulting from systems of oppression and sin. I didn’t know it at the time, but this book, which was first published in 1978, is considered a classic. In 2006, it was listed at No. 7 in “The Top 50 Books that Have Shaped Evangelicals” by the flagship evangelical magazine Christianity Today and has sold 400,000 copies in nine languages. The book changed my life. Read more
New York City’s Largest Evangelical Church Plans Billion-Dollar Development. By Emily Belz / Christianity Today
The Brooklyn congregation and its pastor A.R. Bernard hope the Jane Jacobs–inspired urban village will be a model for other cities.
A. R. Bernard, pastor of the largest evangelical church in New York City, has been working on a plan for more than 10 years. Now the proposal to build a $1.2 billion urban village and revitalize the struggling neighborhood around his church is progressing through the city’s approval process and closer to reality. The Christian Cultural Center (CCC) hopes developers could break ground in Brooklyn next year. Read more
3 ways Catholics can be allies to Asian Americans. By Channing Lee / NCR
At the Unity March, a multicultural event earlier this summer in Washington, D.C., that brought together Asian Americans and allies to advance socioeconomic and cultural equity, racial justice and solidarity, the first half hour featured a slew of religious leaders: a female Korean American Presbyterian minister, a Sikh community leader, a Jewish Filipina rabbi and an African American AME pastor. The speakers were moving, but I wondered: Where were the Catholics? At a time when anti-Asian hate remains endemic in our communities, Catholics of all levels —from the clergy to laity — cannot just offer prayers but also should also serve as allies by actively participating in the “fraternity and social friendship“ about which Pope Francis speaks so frequently. After all, 1 in 5 Asian and Pacific Islander Americans, or AAPIs, is Catholic. Read more
Why the largest US Lutheran denomination apologized to a Latino congregation. By Emily McFarlan Miller / Religion News
It’s been a ‘perfect storm’ of charismatic personalities and a heightened awareness of racism, all brewing in one of the country’s whitest denominations.
On Tuesday afternoon (Aug. 9), leaders of the denomination delivered an apology to Iglesia Luterana Santa María Peregrina, formerly Misión Latina Luterana, and expressed a commitment to anti-racism at the ELCA Churchwide Assembly, the triennial meeting of the 3.3 million-person denomination taking place this week in Columbus, Ohio. “This is in response to recent events in this church that have caused harm to people, communities and the whole body of Christ,” said a church press release. Read more
Historical / Cultural
Colonial Williamsburg tells the story of early American settlers. But in 1956 it paved over Black history to make a parking lot. By Jacquelyne Germain / CNN
Beneath the asphalt parking lot of America’s largest living history museum, gravesites linked to one of the nation’s oldest Black churches remained hidden for decades until last year. Archaeologists in Williamsburg, Virginia, are now excavating three burials at the original location of the historic 18th century First Baptist Church, launching a monthslong process to unearth information about who was buried there and what kind of lives they led. Read more
The Right-Wing Plot To Destroy Public Libraries. By Nathalie Baptiste / HuffPost
There’s a long history of book-banning in the U.S. But conservative groups are emboldened like never before, and they’re taking their mission to a new level.
There’s a long tradition of book-banning in the U.S. In the 1980s, the Moral Majority, the group founded by Jerry Falwell, was leading the charge in book banning. Thanks to the election of Ronald Reagan, Christian evangelicals’ influence was growing in public life — and they objected to any books that didn’t reflect their beliefs back at them. But while the movements have echoes of each other, the new effort to ban books has definitely changed. Read more
Scholars Remember Dr. James Turner, Pioneer of Africana Studies. By Walter Hudson / Diverse Issues in Higher Ed.
Dr. James Turner, a pioneer in the field of Black studies and the founding director of the Africana Studies and Research Center at Cornell University, died last week.
In many ways, Cornell is considered the birthplace of Africana studies, a term Turner coined to conceptualize the comprehensive studies of the African diaspora and describe the multidisciplinary analysis of the lives and thoughts of people of African ancestry throughout the world. Turner was a founding member of TransAfrica, an African American lobbying organization. During the 1970s, he was the national organizer of the Southern Africa Liberation Support Committee, which pressed the anti-apartheid campaign in the United States. Read more
After Chadwick Boseman’s Iconic Black Panther, Should King T’Challa Be Recast? By Roxane Gay / NYT
The actor Chadwick Boseman’s death, from cancer in August 2020, was a breathtaking shock. With his performance as Marvel’s Black Panther, Mr. Boseman became a towering figure, particularly for Black people, who rarely get to see themselves depicted as heroes on the screen. As T’Challa, bearer of the mantle of Black Panther, Mr. Boseman expanded our cultural imaginations. He was the king of Wakanda, an uncolonized Black nation and the most technologically advanced country in the world. He made it seem as if anything was possible. An excellent actor playing an excellent role, Mr. Boseman was so intertwined with his superhero persona that many proclaimed no one else could ever step into the role of T’Challa — that no one should. Read more
A Mother on a Mission: World-Class Music for Everyone. By David Margolick / NYT
Community Concerts aimed for “a Carnegie Hall in every town.” Its adherents, including the author’s mother, were devoted to the cause. For decades, the experiment worked.
After Don Shirley performed with his trio before an appreciative audience in the Putnam High School auditorium in November 1965, he did not go back to his lonely motel room and hit the Cutty Sark, the way he did in the movie “Green Book” — at least not right away. Thanks largely to my mother, he came to our house first. Shirley, a pianist, appeared with his ensemble in many small towns like Putnam, a place The New York Times once described as a “nondescript old mill town,” population 9,000 or so, in the northeastern corner of Connecticut. Some were in the South, and “Green Book,” which won an Oscar for best picture four years ago, captured the bigotry that Shirley, who was Black and gay, encountered there. Read more
Motown songwriter-producer Lamont Dozier dead at 81. By Hillel Italie / ABC News
Lamont Dozier, the middle name of the celebrated Holland-Dozier-Holland team that wrote and produced “You Can’t Hurry Love,” “Heat Wave” and dozens of other hits and helped make Motown an essential record company of the 1960s and beyond, has died at age 81. Dozier died “peacefully” Monday at his home near Scottsdale, Arizona, according to a statement issued by his family. The cause of death was not immediately determined. Duke Fakir, a close friend and the last surviving member of the original Four Tops, called Dozier a “beautiful, talented guy” with an uncanny sense of what material worked best for a given group. Read more
Nicki Minaj to receive MTV’s Video Vanguard Award. By Variety / NBC News
Rapper, singer and songwriter Nicki Minaj will receive MTV’s Michael Jackson Video Vanguard Award and perform for the first time since 2018 at the 2022 VMAs, airing live from Prudential Center on Sunday, Aug. 28. “Nicki has broken barriers for women in hip-hop with her versatility and creative artistry,” said Bruce Gillmer, president of music, music talent, programming and events, Paramount+. “She has shifted the music industry and cemented her status as a global superstar with her crossover appeal, genre-defying style and continuing to be unapologetically ‘Nicki’.” Read more
Jamaica’s Musical Legacy in 60 Songs, From Bob Marley to Popcaan. By Patricia Meschino / Rolling Stone
August 6th marks the 60th anniversary of Jamaican independence. To celebrate, we’ve selected one song from every year of the island’s incredible musical history since 1962.
In the 60 years since Jamaica achieved its independence from England, on Aug. 6, 1962, the tiny Caribbean nation has created some of the world’s most influential musical styles, including ska, rock steady, reggae, dub, and dancehall. Likewise, over the past 60 years, Jamaican artists have distilled inspirations from various parts of the world into distinctive sounds that, when coupled with the island’s astonishingly prolific recorded output, has made “the land of wood and water,” as its first inhabitants, the Arawak Indians called it, one of the most significant musical destinations in the world. To celebrate Jamaica’s Diamond Jubilee, we’ve compiled a list of 60 songs, one song per year, to tell the story of the island’s musical evolution. Some tracks were chosen because they heralded a new direction in sound, others sparked a movement, some engendered controversy, marked a turning point in an artist’s career, or had a significant impact at the time of their release. Read and listen here
Sports
Serena Williams Leaves Tennis Just as She Played: On Her Own Terms. Kurt Streeter / NYT
Williams brought her own distinctive flair to tennis, challenging norms that governed fashion, power, decorum, race and gender. By being herself, Williams’s reach far exceeded the game.
She is a symbol. A persona. An athlete who has gone far beyond the footsteps of her trailblazing sister and came to rule a cloistered, mostly white sport. She refuses to stop there. Announcing her plans to retire from tennis, Serena Williams said on Tuesday that she will focus her life far beyond sports, instead prioritizing being a mother, a fashion maker, a venture capitalist and much more. She will design her future as she sees fit. That’s oh-so-Serena. Read more
Related: Serena Williams is set to redefine ‘retirement.’ By William C. Rhoden / Andscape
It’s been 50 years since Josh Gibson and Buck Leonard made Hall of Fame history. By Frederic J. Frommer / Wash Post
“Wake up, Dad,” said Josh Gibson Jr., “you just made it in.” With those words in Cooperstown, N.Y., a half-century ago Sunday, the younger Gibson accepted the plaque that welcomed his late father, Josh Gibson, into the National Baseball Hall of Fame, along with another Negro League star, Buck Leonard. The two men, who played for the Homestead Grays and were known as “the Black Babe Ruth” and “the Black Lou Gehrig,” never got a shot in the major leagues. But on Aug. 7, 1972, they became the first exclusively Negro League players inducted into Cooperstown. Read more
Mike Tyson Takes Shots At Hulu For Stealing His Story In New Series: ‘Heads Will Roll For This.’ By Jazmin Tolliver / HuffPost
The former heavyweight champ called out the streaming service in a series of heated social media posts.
Mike Tyson is squaring up with Hulu over the new series “Mike.” In a series of statements posted on his social media accounts Saturday, the famous boxer aired out the company for allegedly producing the biographical series without his approval and not providing compensation. In an Instagram post, Tyson noted he doesn’t support Hulu’s upcoming limited series about his life and career: “Hulu is the streaming version of the slave master. They stole my story and didn’t pay me.” Read more
Why Do I Have to Work Twice as Hard Just to Get Noticed?’ By Kurt Streeter / NYT
Sylvia Fowles has been as dominant on the court as Sue Bird, but only one of them is a household name, our columnist writes.
Sylvia Fowles is one of the most successful American athletes ever. Four Olympic gold medals with the U.S. national women’s basketball team. Two W.N.B.A. titles with the Minnesota Lynx. Eight W.N.B.A. All-Star teams. One league Most Valuable Player Award. She is the league’s greatest rebounder and its career leader in field-goal percentage. Fowles won big in college at Louisiana State. In Europe. In Russia. In China. How much of the above did you know before reading this, especially those of you who don’t pay great attention to women’s basketball? Most likely not much, and that’s a shame because you’ve missed out on greatness. Read more
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