Featured
Jan. 6 hearings are about race even if it’s not being talked about. Sandhya Dirks / NPR
Just as the Lost Cause denied the brutal racism of slavery in order to perpetuate violent inequity through other means, at the heart of the Big Lie is also a drive to protect a racist order, according to Stanford University political scientist Hakeem Jefferson. Jefferson says both the Lost Cause and the Big Lie are myths meant to justify — and at the same time deny the existence of — violence meant to preserve white power.
But just the symbolism of Thompson at the helm of the hearings places race and history on display, Jefferson says.
“How striking to see someone who looks like Bennie Thompson wield this amount of institutional power, against a person like Donald Trump, who is awash in the markings of whiteness and privilege and all that it affords.” It’s Thompson’s very Black Southern-ness that allows him to “weave into this narrative, both explicitly and implicitly by way of his identity, how much this has to do about race,” Jefferson says. Read more
Political / Social
The Idea That Letting Trump Walk Will Heal America Is Ridiculous. By Jamelle Bouie / NYT
The main argument against prosecuting Donald Trump — or investigating him with an eye toward criminal prosecution — is that it will worsen an already volatile fracture in American society between Republicans and Democrats. If, before an indictment, we could contain the forces of political chaos and social dissolution, the argument goes, then in the aftermath of such a move, we would be at their mercy. American democracy might not survive the stress. Read more
Representative Val Demings Wins Democratic Primary to Run for U.S. Senate in Florida. By Reuters
U.S. Senate candidate and U.S. Representative Val Demings (D-FL) gives a campaign speech during the gala event of the Florida Democratic Party Leadership Blue 2022 convention in Tampa, Florida, U.S. July 16, 2022.
U.S. Representative Val Demings, a former police chief of Orlando, Florida, won the Democratic nomination to run for U.S. Senate in the state, Edison Research projected on Tuesday. She will face incumbent Republican Senator Marco Rubio, who is favored to win the Nov. 8 general election, though one recent poll showed Demings with a modest lead over Rubio. Read more
Herschel Walker: ‘Don’t We Have Enough Trees Around Here?’ By Liz Skalka / HuffPost
“You know that some of this money is going into trees?” the Republican Senate candidate said at an event Sunday in response to the new climate law.
Georgia Republican Herschel Walker said the Biden administration’s sweeping new climate law represents unnecessary spending because it sets aside money to plant and protect trees. “They try to fool you and make you think they are helping you out — they’re not. You know that some of this money is going into trees? We got enough trees — don’t we have enough trees around here?” Walker said Sunday in Georgia, the Atlanta Journal-Constitution reported. Read more
Race played a ‘major role’ in new restrictive voting laws, study finds. By Phillip M. Bailey / USA Today
The U.S. is witnessing a furious debate over election rules and voting rights unseen since the 1960s heading into the 2022 midterms.
A new analysis of U.S. voting laws conducted by the Brennan Center for Justice, a nonpartisan policy group, found the country’s most racially diverse states are the ones being submerged by the deluge of stiffer laws more than predominately white states. It illuminates how these ongoing changes are fueled by a combination of lies and conspiracy theories about the last presidential contest — in addition to a rising “racial resentment” toward voters of color, who flexed their electoral power during that same election. Read more
Many Native Americans say inflation is severely affecting their lives. By Katia Riddle / NPR
No other single group in the country is feeling as much financial strain right now as are Native Americans. A recent poll from NPR, the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation and the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health found inflation has caused a staggering 69% of Native Americans significant financial problems. According to census data, close to 27% of Native Americans live in poverty. That’s significantly more than the rest of the country, which averages close to 15%. Read more
Emmett Till alert system aims to bring awareness to hate crimes in Maryland. By Jonathan Franklin / NPR
Maryland has seen a slew of racist incidents over the last year — including targeted bomb threats at three Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs) and vandals writing messages of hate on the doors of a church. Now, the state has launched an alert system to flag racist incidents and acts of hate. The new warning system, which went into effect this week, will notify Black leaders across Maryland of any credible racist incidents or hate crimes that take place anywhere in the state. Read more
After Asian hate during COVID, Asian Americans call out racism at work. By Jessica Guynn / USA Today
As anti-Asian attacks surged during the COVID pandemic, California psychotherapist Felicia Ortiz noticed she was seeing more Asian American clients than usual. Brutal images of Asian Americans being beaten, spit on or called slurs were forcing them to come to terms with a deeply private and painful part of their lives they usually tried to ignore: racist remarks, negative stereotypes, harassment and discrimination at work. “The level of violence they’ve seen on streets throughout the country has created even more awareness about the systemic discrimination they face in the workplace,” she said. Read more
LGBTQ advocates say the government is missing communities of color in its monkeypox response. By Megan Messerly and Krista Mahr / Politico
Officials are expanding outreach campaigns to reach Black and Latino men, but huge disparities persist.
As monkeypox spreads across the country, new data suggests a worrying trend: Black and Latino men who have sex with men are far more likely to catch the virus than their white counterparts. While the numbers are limited, they are stark. Nearly 28 percent of monkeypox cases in the U.S. right now are among Black individuals, and 33 percent are among Hispanic people, CDC Director Rochelle Walensky said on Thursday, despite those groups only comprising 13.6 and 18.9 percent of the population, respectively. Read more
What Will Happen to Black Workers’ Gains if There’s a Recession? Talmon Joseph Smith and
Ex-Cop Lied on Breonna Taylor Search Warrant, Pleads Guilty. New York Magazine
More than two years after Breonna Taylor’s death, a former police officer has admitted wrongdoing in the tragedy. Former Louisville detective Kelly Goodlett pleaded guilty in federal court on Tuesday, August 23, to helping falsify a search warrant for Taylor’s home. Goodlett now faces up to five years in prison. Three other current and former police officers involved in the incident face federal charges. The long-awaited development, which was announced by Attorney General Merrick Garland at a press conference in early August, comes after an in-depth investigation that alleges the Louisville cops lied to get a search warrant and later, after the botched raid on Taylor’s apartment, created a false cover story. Read more
Ethics / Morality / Religion
The Rising Influence of the New Apostolic Reformation. By Elie Hardy / TNR
The New Apostolic Reformation doesn’t always admit its own existence, but it’s growing in influence in the Republican Party. Pennsylvania Republican gubernatorial nominee Doug Mastriano is one of the New Apostolic Reformation’s best-known political proponents.
Emerging out of the Pentecostal and Charismatic movements, which account for some 600 million Christians worldwide, the New Apostolic Reformation has arguably become the center of gravity in modern American Christianity. It’s hell-bent on energizing believers for the End Times: Church is no longer something you attend on Sunday—it’s a place to orchestrate the radical transformation of society. Now NAR is becoming increasingly influential within the Republican Party. Read more
Why the Evangelical Movement Is in ‘Disarray’ After Dobbs. The Ezra Klein Show / NYT Podcast
With Roe now overturned, the evangelical movement has achieved one of its decades-old political priorities. But for many evangelicals, this isn’t the moment of celebration and unity it may have first appeared to be. In the wake of the decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, Russell Moore — a former president of the Ethics & Religious Liberty Commission, the policy wing of the Southern Baptist Convention — described the state of evangelicalism as one of “disarray.” So this is a conversation about how evangelicalism morphed into the political identity we know it as today, why so many evangelicals have come to embrace apocalyptic thinking about politics and where the movement goes next now that Roe has been overturned. Read more and Listen here
‘Honk for Jesus’: How the Ebo Sisters’ Outrageous Mega-Church Comedy Saved Their Souls. By Suchana News This fall, the comedy Honk For Jesus. Save Your Soul. — starring Regina Hall and Sterling Ok. Brown as Southern Baptist scammers sweating to re-open their megachurch after a public scandal — won’t simply herald the ascendance of a contemporary new comedian filmmaker. It will introduce viewers to two sharp and humorous filmmakers, really: Identical twins Adamma and Adanne Ebo, 31-year-old double Geminis from Atlanta, Georgia, who grew up taking part in basketball at the identical sprawling home of worship the place their movie was shot. “I’m unsure what double Gemini means,” Adamma says over Zoom from Atlanta, the place she’s directing a present created by Donald Glover. “But individuals are all the time like, ‘Oh, wow.’” Read more
The Man Who Found His Inner Depths. By David Brooks / NYT
Buechner, who died this week at 96, became a master of uncovering his inner depths. The titles of his books speak to the mission he set for himself: “The Sacred Journey,” “The Longing for Home,” “Telling Secrets,” “The Eyes of the Heart.” His books are understated, not narcissistic. By and large, they don’t make arguments. Buechner’s books tell stories, let you experience another person’s experience, let you get involved with the deep parts of one person’s life to see where it rhymes with and differs from your own. Read more
Historical / Cultural
Howard Zinn at 100: Remembering “The People’s Historian.” By Robert Cohen and Sonia Murrow / The Nation
Zinn made no pretense of neutrality. He believed that “in a world of conflict,” it was the historian’s job to advocate for the oppressed.
Today marks the centennial of historian Howard Zinn’s birth. More than a decade after Zinn’s death in 2010, his best-selling A People’s History of the United States (1980) remains the most popular—and radical—introduction to American history, having recently surpassed 4 million copies sold. Zinn did more than any other historian to popularize the historiographical revolution of the Long 1960s, bringing from the campuses to the public its spotlight on the oppression of groups formerly marginalized in US history textbooks: African Americans, workers, Native Americans, women—and on their liberation movements. In place of traditional textbook triumphalism, Zinn’s People’s History offered a scathing account of American capitalism’s role in promoting economic, racial, and sexual inequality. Read more
Statue honors once-enslaved woman who won freedom in court. By AP and NPR
A monument of civil rights pioneer Elizabeth Freeman is unveiled in front of Sheffield’s Old Parish Church in Sheffield, Mass.
The story of an enslaved woman who went to court to win her freedom more than 80 years before the Emancipation Proclamation had been pushed to the fringes of history. A group of civic leaders, activists and historians hope that ended Sunday in the quiet Massachusetts town of Sheffield with the unveiling of a bronze statue of the woman who chose the name Elizabeth Freeman when she shed the chains of slavery 241 years ago to the day. Her story, while remarkable, remains relatively obscure. Read more
All-Black women crew operates American Airlines flight from Dallas in honor of trailblazer Bessie Coleman. By Emma Tucker / CNN
American pilot Bessie Coleman in her bi-plane, circa 1920.
An all-Black female crew operated an American Airlines flight from Dallas to Phoenix in honor of Bessie Coleman, the first Black woman to earn a pilot’s license in 1921. The airline hosted the Bessie Coleman Aviation All-Stars tour this week to celebrate the 100th anniversary of Coleman performing the first public flight by an African American woman in 1922. “She bravely broke down barriers within the world of aviation and paved the path for many to follow,” American Airlines said in a statement. Read more
How Stokely Carmichael Helped Inspire the Creation of C-SPAN. By Eamon Whalen / Mother Jones
A Black Power radical, a Navy veteran, and the story behind the most boring channel on television.
In the late 1960s, Brian Lamb, the eventual founder of the cable network C-SPAN, sat at a Black Baptist church watching Stokely Carmichael give a speech. About a decade later Lamb founded the Cable Satellite Public Affairs Network, also known as C-SPAN. While the network is most known now for wall-to-wall congressional coverage, it was Carmichael’s unfair representation by white media that Lamb has said helped inspire the attempt to bring the public news without imposition. He wanted a channel “where everybody gets to see everything from start to finish,” he told the Times. Read more
The Rhythm and Blues Hall of Fame is headed to a small Mississippi Delta town. By AP and NPR
This image provided by A2H Engineers, Architects, Planners on Aug. 18, 2022, shows digital rendering of the National Rhythm and Blues Hall of Fame in Marks, Miss.
A small town in the Mississippi Delta that has ties to the civil rights movement will soon be home to the National Rhythm and Blues Hall of Fame. Project planners hope to finish building the facility in the town of Marks in two or three years, Velma Wilson, director of economic tourism and development for Quitman County, told The Associated Press on Tuesday. Marks is the county seat of Quitman County and has a population of fewer than 2,000 people. The project is the culmination of a 50-year effort to build a hall of fame for R&B musicians such as James Brown, Aretha Franklin and B.B. King. Read more
In Tulsa, the movement for reparations scores a historic victory. By Karen Attiah / Wash Post
In May, a judge allowed a reparations lawsuit brought by the attack’s last living survivors to go forward. Then, this month, the suit was allowed to go to the discovery phase. It’s the first time in U.S. history that a lawsuit filed by Black victims of such historic white terrorism has progressed this far. The bad news, though, is that too little attention has been paid to what these milestones mean for racial justice in America. To shed light on these developments, I caught up with Damario Solomon-Simmons, one of the lawyers representing the survivors. Here’s some of our conversation, edited lightly for clarity. Read more
How to transition to natural hair — and learn to love it : Life Kit. By Venessa Handy / NPR
The Black women in my family have been straightening their hair for as long as I can remember. Because of this, straight hair was all I knew. Without it, I rarely felt confident or beautiful. Eventually, I got fed up with the pressure to keep my hair straight. I wanted to learn how to love and embrace the hair I was born with. So in 2019, I decided to ditch the hot tools and transition to wearing my hair natural full time. It was a frustrating process. I didn’t feel confident I was using the right techniques. I wasn’t even sure which products to use. Eventually, after two years, I figured it out. But I wished I had talked to professionals sooner. That’s why I created this guide to natural hair care – to help others have an easier journey. Read more
Sports
Rooney Rule at 20: A look back at the policy that changed the NFL’s hiring of Black coaches.
In 2002, a report analyzing the records of Black head coaches (and a potential lawsuit) forced the league to act. Two decades later, the rule still has its critics.
While the Rooney Rule has drastically increased the number of Black and minority head coaches in the league since 2002, the policy still has its critics, who mostly argue that the policy doesn’t go far enough to encourage diverse hiring and can lead to sham interviews for Black candidates in order to satisfy the rule. But arguments over the sanctity of the Rooney Rule don’t even take place without the publication of a research study — and a threatened lawsuit — 20 years ago by Mehri and one of the most famous lawyers in American history. That report finally made the NFL act on its diversity problem among the head coaching ranks, and birthed what would come to be known as the Rooney Rule. Read more
Serena Williams has a new game plan: venture capital. By Scott Neuman / NPR
When megastar Serena Williams recently said that she plans to retire from tennis after the upcoming U.S. Open, she added an intriguing tidbit about her future: She will turn her focus to a venture capital firm she quietly formed eight years ago. The announcement last week by Williams, who has won 23 Grand Slam singles titles in a career that has spanned more than a quarter century, reignited talk of just how few women and minorities inhabit the elite world of high-stakes venture capital, where often risky investments are made in startup companies in hopes that the investors will reap a significant return. Read more
Isiah Thomas interview: NBA star reflects on 1986’s No Crime Day in Detroit. By Josh Levin / Slate
Detroit had 648 homicides in 1986, the highest per capita murder rate of any major American city. While plenty of Detroiters did what they could to make their neighborhoods safer, fixing the city’s problems felt totally impossible. But one of Detroit’s biggest celebrities thought he might have the answer. On the first episode of the third season of Slate’s history podcast One Year, we tell the story of Isiah Thomas’ audacious attempt to change Detroit. By 1986, the Pistons point guard had become a star in the NBA, and he wanted to make a difference off the court. That summer, while he was recovering from thumb surgery, the idea came to him: Detroit should have a “No Crime Day.” Read more and listen here
Mike review – Tyson biopic series struggles to pack a punch. By AA Dowd / The Guardian
Trevante Rhodes, whose casting as Mike Tyson is the closest thing to a knockout punch.
Hulu’s new eight-part biographical drama Mike does not shy away from the uglier aspects of the Mike Tyson story. That has to be one reason why the heavyweight champion, American icon, and convicted sex offender has so loudly denounced the project: in covering 40 years of triumphs in the ring and transgressions committed outside of it, this flashy mini-series avoids the flattering hagiography that often characterizes officially authorized accounts. What it doesn’t avoid, however, is Hollywood’s prevailing weakness for conforming eventful, messy lives to a dramatic blueprint. Read more
Related: Anthony Joshua fights back tears after Oleksandr Usyk defeat. By Sana Noor Haq / CNN
Dennis Rodman could hurt Brittney Griner’s cause, experts say. By Chris Bumbaca / USA Today
Dennis Rodman has once again inserted himself into U.S. diplomatic relations, this time in an effort to free detained WNBA star Brittney Griner. He told NBC News he plans to travel to Russia to “help that girl.” Rodman, the enigmatic three-time NBA champion with the Chicago Bulls and a Hall of Famer, made his first foray into attempting peace with U.S. adversaries by bonding with North Korea dictator Kim Jong-Un over basketball. The current task would be negotiating with Russia for the release of Griner, who was convicted on drug charges and sentenced to nine years in prison earlier this month (she is currently appealing). His contributions to the negotiations — if Russia even chooses to pay attention to him — will be minimal, experts say. Read more
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