Race Inquiry Digest (August 17) – Important Current Stories On Race In America

Feature – Trump Knows Exactly What He’s Doing. President Trump’s press conference was the clearest and most precise articulation of a view that Trump has espoused since the start of his political career. He worked to draw a fine distinction between different elements of the march, and in the process to rescue his own vision of pride in white America from being tarnished from association with neo-Nazis. Read more 

‘A Treacherous President Stood in the Way.’ Frederick Douglass’s 1866 essay for The Atlantic on how Congress can cope with a chief executive who refuses to recognize the rights of all citizens. Read more 

Full Interview: Ta-Nehisi Coates on Charlottesville, Trump, the Confederacy, Reparations & More. Ta-Nehisi Coates speaks to Democracy Now! in his first major interview since the inauguration of Donald Trump. Read more 

Eric Foner: White Nationalists, Neo-Confederates, and Donald Trump. The historian and author explains how racism is part of the Trump family DNA. Read more 

VICE’s Charlottesville documentary on Trump’s “fine people” will terrify you.  VICE News’ “Charlottesville: Race and Terror” episode opens with images from the white nationalist protest on Friday in Charlottesville. Red-faced white men hold Tiki torches ablaze and chant “white lives matter,” “Jews will not replace us,” and “blood and soil.” Read more 

The whole point of Confederate monuments is to celebrate white supremacy. They were part of a campaign to paint the Southern cause in the Civil War as just and slavery as a benevolent institution, and their installation came against a backdrop of Jim Crow violence and oppression of African Americans. Read more 

I’m a black Southerner. I had to go abroad to see a statue celebrating black liberation. This July, I traveled to Barbados to unwind and get away. I didn’t know I’d encounter a monument that would help me understand how America processes our history. Read more 

Symbols of the Confederacy still dot the South.  Virginia – the birthplace of Robert E. Lee and home to Saturday’s violent white nationalist rally – has the highest density of Confederate symbols in the country. Read more 

Charlottesville and the Trouble with Civil War Hypotheticals. Charlottesville reminded us that the world of “Confederate,” a forthcoming HBO series that imagines an America in which the South won the Civil War, isn’t that far away from our own. Read more 

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