Featured
I Taught My 4th Grade Class About White Privilege And Their Response Was Eye-Opening. By Justin Mazzola / HuffPost
“Students tackled the Louisiana literacy test, which was given to would-be Black voters in the 1960s. Every one of them failed.”
As disinformation and “alternative facts” divide our country, teaching children how to think for themselves has never been more crucial — even if their conclusions run counter to their parents’ beliefs. Showing kids America’s complete history allows them to see how fear and greed can draw our leaders down dark paths, and how those choices impact people and the planet. If we ignore these missteps to instead focus solely on American exceptionalism, we face future generations of nationalistic leaders preying on voters’ ignorance and xenophobia.
Our nation’s best chance at progress is for professional teachers to shed light on its complicated past while empowering students to formulate their own fact-based opinions ― and politicians shouldn’t be standing in the way. Read more
Related: Asian American History Must Be Taught in Schools. By Kimi Waite / The Progressive
Political / Social
Federal Judge Declares Ron DeSantis’s Ridiculous “Woke Indoctrination” Law Unconstitutional. By Bess Levin / Vanity Fair
A judge said Thursday that the law, which regulates race-based conversations in schools and businesses, violates the First Amendment.
If you’ve been keeping up with life in Florida lately, you likely know that Governor Ron DeSantis is on a one-man crusade to turn the place into an uninhabitable hellhole. Thus far, that campaign has included signing the bigoted “Don’t Say Gay” bill into law; banning Medicaid from covering gender-affirming care for trans people; firing an elected official for refusing to prosecute pregnant people seeking abortions; going scorched earth on a major company that dared to disagree with him about LGBTQ+ issues; bullying the Special Olympics; and signing the ridiculous “Stop WOKE Act,” which effectively bans schools and private businesses from making white people feel bad about the history of racism in this country. And while there’s little hope for Floridians living under this petty tyrant, on Thursday they got a rare bit of good news when a district judge declared the “Stop WOKE” law a no-go. Read more
Related: DeSantis’s new election crimes unit makes its first arrests. By Lori Rozsa and Tim Craig / Wash Post
Republicans Are America’s Problem. By Charles M. Blow / NYT
We must stop thinking it hyperbolic to say that the Republican Party itself is now a threat to our democracy. I understand the queasiness about labeling many of our fellow Americans in that way. I understand that it sounds extreme and overreaching. But how else are we to describe what we are seeing? Read more
Related: Voters tell us who they are by who they vote for. By Colbert I. King / Wash Post
Activists in Florida say Black voters have seen their political power curtailed. By Ashley Lopez / NPR
A combination of new election laws and congressional redistricting has made it harder for Black communities in Florida to organize and vote, activists say.
Florida, which concludes its primary elections on Tuesday, is among various Republican-led states that have passed laws since the 2020 election that place new restrictions on voters — as well as on third-party groups that play a big role in registering racial minorities in Florida. Read more
Related: Midterms: Florida gets first test of new voting laws. By Rick Rousan / USA Today
US supreme court backs Black voters challenging Georgia election rules. By Samira Asma-Sadeque / The Guardian
Ruling comes as plaintiffs say current Georgia public service commission election system discriminates against Black voters
Black voters challenging Georgia’s method of electing members to the state’s public service commission scored a preliminary US supreme court order in their favor late Friday. The decision came after conflicting rulings from lower courts earlier this month, offering up a rare example of the supreme court’s 6-3 conservative majority’s siding with voters over state officials. Read more
Rep. Jim Clyburn says there’s a “dark place” on the horizon for voting rights. By Aaron Navarro / CBS News
To House Majority Whip Jim Clyburn, the highest ranking Black legislator in Congress, “racial gerrymandering” — what he describes as the intentional drawing of congressional districts that discriminate against minority populations — has deep roots in America’s history. In South Carolina’s new congressional map, Clyburn’s district no longer has a majority-minority population. The percentage of Black residents in his district dropped from 53.3% to 47.82% in the newly-enacted map. There are no congressional districts in South Carolina with a majority Black population, despite the state’s Black residents making up over a quarter of the total population. Read more
How a Storied Phrase Became a Partisan Battleground. By Jazmine Ulloa / NYT
A touchstone of political and social discourse, the nearly 100-year-old phrase “the American dream,” is being repurposed — critics say distorted — particularly by Republicans of color.
Juan Ciscomani, a Republican who washed cars to help his Mexican immigrant father pay the bills and is now running for Congress in Arizona, has been leaning on a simple three-word phrase throughout his campaign — “the American dream.” To him, the American dream, a nearly 100-year-old idea weighted with meaning and memory, has become something not so much to aspire to but to defend from attack. President Biden and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi are, he says in one ad, “destroying the American dream” with “a border crisis, soaring inflation and schools that don’t teach the good things about America.” Read more
Joe Biden To Host Unity Summit Against Hate-Fueled Violence In. By Zeke Miller / HuffPost
The event is part of the president’s efforts to deliver on his campaign promise to “heal the soul of the nation.”
President Joe Biden will host a White House summit next month aimed at combating a spate of hate-fueled violence in the U.S., as he works to deliver on his campaign pledge to “heal the soul of the nation.” The White House announced Friday that Biden will ost the United We Stand Summit on Sept. 15, highlighting the “corrosive effects” of violence on public safety and democracy. Advocates pushed Biden to hold the event after 10 Black people were killed at a Buffalo, New York, supermarket in May, aiming as well to address a succession of hate-driven violence in cities including El Paso, Texas, Pittsburgh and Oak Creek, Wisconsin. Read more
Tim Scott’s book of miracles. By Kathleen Parker / Wash Post
Though I’ve met Scott on several occasions, he’s a bit of an enigma to me and, likely, to the rest of the country.
Just how did a Black kid raised by a single mom in North Charleston, S.C., his self-esteem daily blunted by his reflection in the mirror, become the handsome politician who bears malice toward none — and whose ability to let water run off his back has made him the envy of ducks? Read more
More Black Americans live in Texas than any other state. Two years after George Floyd’s murder, many reconsider their future here. By Jaden Edison / The Texas TribuneIn interviews, Black Texans expressed frustration over uneven progress, restrictions on teaching about racism in public schools and limitations on their political representation and voting access.
Texas is home to more Black Americans than any other state — more than 3.8 million, about 13% of the state’s population. The state was founded by white men who were determined to expand slavery westward — the conflict that sparked the Civil War. Today, white men are overrepresented in the Legislature. At the start of the 2021 regular legislative session, there were 17 Black lawmakers in the 150-member Texas House — 16 Democrats and one Republican. Only two Black senators, both Democrats, serve in the 31-member Texas Senate. A few Black Texans have held statewide office, but none have made it to the senior-most executive and legislative positions. Read more
Free college tuition for Native students becoming more common. By Emma Hall / NPR
The UC system, the largest in the nation, is part of a growing number of schools to make tuition free for Native students. In June, the University of Arizona announced free tuition for students who are enrolled with a federally recognized tribe in Arizona. This fall, Oregon State University will grant in-state tuition for every federally-recognized Native student, regardless of where they live. These programs aim to support Native students, who had the highest dropout rates out of any ethnic group in the country during the pandemic. But it’s not just a pandemic issue, Native student enrollment has been on the decline since 2008. Read more
Home Appraised With a Black Owner: $472,000. With a White Owner: $750,000. By Debra Kamin / NYT
Dr. Connolly said he knew why: He, his wife and three children, aged 15, 12 and 9, are Black. A professor of history at Johns Hopkins University, Dr. Connolly is an expert on redlining and the legacy of white supremacy in American cities, and much of his research focuses on the role of race in the housing market. Months after that first appraisal, the couple applied for another refinance loan, removed family photos and had a white male colleague — another Johns Hopkins professor — stand in for them. The second appraiser valued the house at $750,000. Read more
Ethics / Morality / Religion
When will their churches condemn the Christian nationalism of MAGA politicians? By David Dark / RNS
Church organizations in America owe it to the American public to hold their publicly abusive congregants to standards of baseline moral seriousness.
We’ve been here before. In Germany, the Barmen Declaration (1934) addressed the Führer Principle as heresy (as well as terror). In South Africa, the Belhar Confession (1982) addressed white supremacist ideology as sin. And more recently, the Council of Bishops of the African Methodist Episcopal Church issued an Episcopal Statement (2017) that invites “people who are committed to justice and righteousness, equality and truth” to help them in the effort “to thwart what are clearly demonic acts (of the Trump administration).” Read more
Book aims to undo the tangles of race and Catholicism. By Maureen H. O’Connell / NCR
In February 1941, prominent Philadelphia activist and devout Catholic Anna McGarry wrote an impassioned letter calling for “a greater measure of interracial justice” from fellow parishioners. Such pleas, however, were undermined by decades of systemic — and distinctly Catholic American — “anti-Blackness,” Maureen O’Connell argues in the provocative book, Undoing the Knots: Five Generations of American Catholic Anti-Blackness. While tracing her own family’s immigrant journey, O’Connell — an associate professor of Christian ethics at La Salle University — argues that “couch[ing] racism in interpersonal rather than structural ways” either failed to counter, or was complicit with, “American Catholic white supremacy.” Read more
Beyoncé invites church girls to celebrate their freedom. By Candice Marie Benbow / RNS
“Lord, place me … I want to be centered in thy will.” Mixed with the sounds of the iconic pioneer of New Orleans bounce music, DJ Jimi, these words, written by Elbernita “Twinkie” Clark of the famed gospel group The Clark Sisters, provide the foundation of “Church Girl,” a stand-out track on Beyoncé’s recently released seventh studio album, “Renaissance.” Blurring the lines between the sacred and profane, the Houston-bred icon — and church girl herself — offers a meditation and anthem celebrating healing, evolution and the power of authenticity. Read more
Descendants of Jesuit slaves say church is delaying promised reparations. By Jesse Washington / Andscape
Joined by other descendants of enslaved people, Joseph Stewart (left) speaks to Georgetown University president John DeGioia (right) as the school announces actions it would take to atone for its history of enslavement in Washington on Sept. 1, 2016.
Three years after descendants of Black people enslaved by Jesuits reached a $1 billion agreement that was hailed as a major achievement in the reparations movement, there is trouble in paradise. On Tuesday, the leader of the Descendants Truth & Reconciliation Foundation, Joe Stewart, released a blistering letter to the head of the worldwide Jesuit order of the Catholic Church. Stewart told Superior General Fr. Arturo Sosa of the Society of Jesus that he and his allies are in a “state of disillusionment” because the foundation has so far received only $15 million of a promised $100 million from U.S. Jesuit authorities, slowing down their efforts. Without intervention from the international church, Stewart wrote, “our partnership will simply disintegrate, and the Jesuits leaders of today will effectively betray Descendants today just as the Jesuits of the past betrayed our ancestors. Read more
Historical / Cultural
When Did Racism Begin? By Vanita Seth / The Chronicle of Higher Ed.
Does racism have its roots in the ancient and premodern past, or is it a product of Western modernity? That question has animated a significant body of recent scholarship on ancient, medieval, and early-modern texts and cultural practices. In his 2015 editorial introduction to a journal issue on race and the Middle Ages, the medievalist Cord Whitaker wrote that the “question of race’s relevance is solved: yes, the Middle Ages have been thoroughly raced.” But has it? Read more
In 1896, Black intellectuals criticized The Post’s coverage of race. By John Kelly / Wash Post
The Sexual Criminalization of Black Women. By Keona K. Ervin / AAIHS
The Streets Belong to Us insists on the critical importance of women and women’s bodies as the mechanism by which state power, through discretionary law enforcement practices, operated. Anne Gray Fischer writes, “…It is not enough to say that women are also policed or differently policed. Women’s bodies are an important and overlooked site on which police power-and the modern city—has been built” (4). Women’s bodies, particularly the bodies of Black women, acted as the constitutive material that made up the very fabric of state power and racial segregation. Read more
How a trip to D.C. helped James Baldwin affirm his Southern identity. By Blake Rogers Wilson / Wash Post
“What part of the South does James Baldwin come from?” a reader named Helga Schneider, of Munich, Germany, wrote to Negro Digest in December 1963. It was a reasonable question: Baldwin himself had said he was “a Southerner” earlier that year. But until 1955, the year that initiated the civil rights movement, one of its most salient voices had never traveled below the Mason-Dixon Line. His visit that year to D.C. would prove transformational. At Howard, Baldwin got his first taste of U.S. college life and met numerous people who would become lifelong friends. One, the pipe-smoking professor and poet Sterling Brown, would become a mentor. Brown defended Baldwin when members of the Howard community questioned his understanding of the South. Read more
Josephine Baker Was the Star France Wanted—and the Spy It Needed. Lauren Michele Jackson / The New Yorker
When the night-club sensation became a Resistance agent, the Nazis never realized what she was hiding in the spotlight.
Even if Baker’s career had been restricted to her role as an entertainer, it would have had the allure of a thriller. The racecraft of the day was bound to give rise to spycraft: all identities are impostures, and Baker had a chameleonic gift for moving among them. But during the war years she was also—as a new book, “Agent Josephine” (PublicAffairs), by the British journalist Damien Lewis, chronicles with much fresh detail—a spy in the most literal sense. There was, after all, little that La Bakaire didn’t understand about resistance. Read more
Black Music Sunday: Chicago and the urban electric blues. By Denise Oliver Velez / Daily Kos
If any city is to be dubbed the home of the modern urban blues, Chicago can certainly lay claim to that title. That is not to say that St. Louis, Detroit, and other places in the path of the great Black migration from the South northward, are not also locations of the shift from the classic Delta blues of the South to the electrified, amplified blues of the big urban cities of the northern Midwest. However, Chicago birthed so many musicians that were key to the shift, which went on to affect the later birth of rock ‘n’ roll on two continents, that Chicagoans can righteously call themselves the title holders. Read more
The Unfinished Business of Michael K. Williams. By Saki Knafo / NYT
The actor set out to save his Brooklyn neighborhood. Here’s how he’s doing it, even in death.
Toward the end of his life, Mr. Williams devoted himself to making Brooklyn’s Black communities safer. He pursued this mission, in part, by helping build a model for organizing that he hoped would eventually inspire a national movement. Through this initiative, called We Build the Block, he and the other organizers held “block activations” throughout Brooklyn, culminating in the mayoral summit in Brownsville. Read more
From 1973 till infinity: How LL COOL J is keeping hip-hop culture alive. By Adam Aziz / Andscape
With Rock the Bells Festival, the legendary rapper is giving rap music pioneers their flowers
Rock the Bells’ mission is to focus on creating content, commerce, and experiences that honor hip-hop culture through working closely with those who were there in the culture’s early days. For LL COOL J, launching Rock the Bells was born out of what he saw as a lack of appreciation for the roots of hip-hop culture. “I felt like timeless, classic hip-hop culture wasn’t being celebrated,” the legendary rapper said. As one of the first artists signed to Def Jam Recordings in the early ’80s, keeping the culture alive has always meant a great deal to him. “I felt like the status quo was leaving timeless hip-hop behind and treating the artists and the art form like an afterthought.” Read more
Sports
When integration was front and center at the Little League World Series. By Chris Lamb / Andscape
White teams from the South were refusing to take the field against teams with Black players as a protest against ruling in Brown v. Board of Education
Black boys were playing in Little League years before Jackie Robinson integrated Major League Baseball in 1947 or the U.S. Supreme Court declared school segregation in public schools unconstitutional in Brown v. Board of Education in 1954. But in 1955, Little League Baseball found itself in a civil war when white teams in South Carolina, Florida, and Texas refused to take the field against Black teams as part of a massive resistance to the Brown decision. Southern politicians feared that if Little League tournaments and other sports were integrated, so, too, would schools, swimming pools, movie theaters, and lunch counters. Read more
Janet Hill, with a Hall of Fame son and an all-pro husband, was a selfless star. By Kevin B. Blackstone / Wash Post
Janet Hill, Grant’s mom and Calvin’s wife, died Saturday after a year-long battle with brain cancer. She was 74. Duke University — where Janet and Calvin’s only child earned a history degree like his dad and all-American honors of his own, leading his team to two national championships — lowered its flags in her honor. She served Duke as a trustee for 15 years until last year. “Although she would say I inherited my athletic ability from my father,” Grant told me by phone this week, “I think she impacted me in every area. She went about everything with such integrity and pursuance of excellence.” Read more
Vanessa Bryant Is Suing L.A. County Over Kobe Bryant Crash Photos: What to Know. By Jonathan Abrams / NYT
Ms. Bryant, whose husband and daughter died in a 2020 helicopter crash, said county employees shared photos of human remains from the crash, causing her emotional distress.
Vanessa Bryant, the wife of the late basketball star Kobe Bryant, testified at a trial on Friday after she sued Los Angeles County and some of its agencies and employees for sharing photos of human remains from the helicopter crash that killed her husband and daughter. In her testimony, Ms. Bryant said she “felt like I wanted to run down the block and just scream” when she found out the photos had been shared. Read more
LeBron James Agrees To New Contract That Will Him Make Highest-Paid NBA Player Ever. AP and HuffPost
LeBron James has agreed to a two-year, $97.1 million contract extension through the 2024-25 season with the Los Angeles Lakers, his agent announced Wednesday. Klutch Sports CEO Rich Paul said the league-maximum deal makes James the highest-paid player in NBA history. His new deal includes a player option that would keep the second-leading scorer in NBA history with the Lakers past his 40th birthday in December 2024. Read more
Byron Allen’s HBCU Go streamer strikes deal with CBS stations to air HBCU football games. By Variety and NBC News
Byron Allen’s free streaming service HBCU Go has struck a nationwide licensing agreement with CBS stations that will run through the 2022-2023 college football season. Under the distribution pact between the Allen Media Group-owned digital platform, which focuses on coverage of the U.S.’s 107 Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs), HBCU Go’s sports programming will be carried on CBS owned-and-operated duopoly stations in these key TV markets: New York, Los Angeles, Philadelphia, Dallas, Atlanta, San Francisco, Boston, Seattle, Tampa, Detroit, Miami and Pittsburgh. Read more
Watson Suspended 11 Games, Fined $5 Million in Sexual Misconduct Case. By Jenny Vrentas and Ken Belson / NYT
The N.F.L. was seeking a yearlong suspension but reached a settlement with the quarterback after an arbitrator recommended a six-game penalty.
Deshaun Watson, the Cleveland Browns quarterback, will be suspended for 11 games and pay a record $5 million fine after the N.F.L. appealed what many thought was a lenient six-game suspension for accusations by more than two dozen women of sexual misconduct in massage appointments. The league announced Thursday that Watson must undergo evaluation by behavioral experts, followed by a treatment program. The fine, as well as an additional $1 million each from the league and the Browns, will be donated to groups that work to prevent sexual assault. Read more
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