Featured – Beto O’Rourke links El Paso shooting to Donald Trump’s ‘racist’ rhetoric – video / The Guardian
The Democratic presidential candidate has accused Donald Trump of stoking racial hatred after a mass shooting in El Paso that left 20 people dead. The population of the Texan border city is 80% Latino and police said a ‘manifesto’ posted to the online message board 8chan suggested the attack was a hate crime. ‘He is a racist. He stokes racism in this country,’ said O’Rourke, a former congressman for El Paso. ‘And it fundamentally changes the character of the country and leads to violence.’ View here
Pete Buttigieg: America ‘Under Attack From Homegrown White Nationalist Terrorists. By Mollie Reilly / HuffPost
Following Saturday’s mass shooting in El Paso, Texas, the mayor of South Bend, Indiana, called for stricter gun laws and condemned white nationalist ideology. View here
Minutes Before El Paso Killing, Hate-Filled Manifesto Appears Online. By Tim Arango, Nicholas Bogel-Burroughs and Katie Benner / NYT
Nineteen minutes before the first 911 call alerted the authorities to a mass shooting at a Walmart in El Paso, Tex., a hate-filled, anti-immigrant manifesto appeared online. It spoke of a “Hispanic invasion of Texas.” It detailed a plan to separate America into territories by race. It warned that white people were being replaced by foreigners. Read more
Does Trump want a race war? Tim Wise on right-wing terrorism and our president. By Chauncey DeVega / Salon
Is Republican strategist Rick Wilson correct in his assessment that Donald Trump wants a “race war” in America? How should we understand Trump’s and the right wing’s dishonest use of “anti-Semitism” as a slur against Democrats and progressives, nonwhites and Muslims? How are Donald Trump, the Republican Party and the broader right-wing movement weaponizing white America’s fear about the country’s changing demographics? In what ways is the recent mass shooting in California by an apparent white supremacist — along with a large increase in right-wing political violence in America — an expected outcome of Trump’s presidency? In an effort to answer these questions, I recently spoke with Tim Wise, one of the nation’s leading anti-racism activists. Read more
Why Trump’s stoking of white racial resentment is effective – but makes all working-class Americans worse off. By Donald T. Tomaskovic-Devey and Eric Hoyt / The Conversation
In our most recent report, called “Race, States and the Mixed Fate of White Men,” we examined the connection between minority populations and the job prospects of white men in private-sector companies. Read more
America has a housing segregation problem. Seattle may just have the solution. By Dylan Mattews / Vox
Most American cities have a stark racial divide. In Seattle, the divide runs north to south: North Seattle is largely white; South Seattle is largely not. Research confirmed a causal link: Living in certain neighborhoods seems to expand opportunity, and living in other neighborhoods seems to diminish it. Read more
Trump Wants to Make It Harder to Claim Housing Discrimination. By Peter Wade / Rolling Stone
The next step in Trump’s never-ending quest to undo Obama era reforms comes in the form of changing housing discrimination regulations to make it more difficult for civil rights groups to prove discrimination while also giving defendants new ways to refute those claims. Read more
Immigration, Nationalism And America’s Founders. By Stuart Anderson / Forbes
Today’s debate over immigration would appear strange to America’s founders. “The United States was founded as an asylum and a refuge: a sanctuary. This was a form of patriotism,” notes Lepore. Thomas Paine called America “an asylum for mankind” and the signers of the Declaration of Independence excoriated the king for obstructing immigration and naturalization. Read more
“The Most Important Place in the World”: On Puerto Rico and the Freedom Struggle. By Dan Berger / AAIHS
Though the United States has colonized Puerto Rico since 1898, when the country took the island as booty in the Spanish-American War, most politicians and pundits haven’t been able to make sense of the island — or its US-based diaspora. In 1901, the same Supreme Court that justified domestic segregation in its Plessy v. Ferguson ruling upheld colonialism abroad by declaring the island and other US colonial conquests (Guam, the Philippines, Hawaii) to be “inhabited by alien races” and “foreign in a domestic sense.” Read more
‘The Accident Of Color’ Looks At The Failure Of Reconstruction. By Kamil Ahsan / NPR
Even today, matters about Reconstruction do not remain simple — a context to which Daniel Brook responds in his new book, The Accident of Color: A Story of Race and Reconstruction. The consensus today is that it was not so much class but the fundamental fact of whiteness that mattered. Southern antebellum racism was simply too intransigent. And so we draw a line — straight from the racist backlash to Reconstruction all the way to the current presidency as a response to the previous one. Read more
The Nuns Who Bought and Sold Human Beings. By Rachel L. Swarns / NYT
When a newly hired school archivist and historian started digging in the convent’s records a few years ago, she found no evidence that the nuns had taught enslaved children to read or write. Instead, she found records that documented a darker side of the order’s history. The Georgetown Visitation sisters owned at least 107 enslaved men, women and children, the records show. And they sold dozens of those people to pay debts and to help finance the expansion of their school and the construction of a new chapel. Read more
Robots and Racism: New Study Suggests That Humans Apply Racial Biases, Stereotypes to Black and White Robots. By Tanasia Kenney / AtlBlackStar
A new study out of New Zealand’s University of Canterbury found that humans tend to extend their racial biases to black and white robots, CNN reported. The “Robots and Racism” study, conducted by the Human Interface Technology Laboratory, suggests that humans assign a race to human-like robots, then project their biases/stereotypes accordingly. Read more
‘Hands Up, Don’t Shoot’ Examines What Led To Ferguson And Baltimore Protests. By Nicholas Cannariato / NPR
In her tightly focused and morally important book, Hands Up, Don’t Shoot, Jennifer E. Cobbina, associate professor in the School of Criminal Justice at Michigan State University, analyzes how the deaths of Michael Brown and Freddie Gray at the hands of police resulted in sustained protests in Ferguson, Mo., and in Baltimore — and how we got there. Read more
Philip Bailey of Earth, Wind & Fire is having a ??? summer. By Christopher A. Daniel / The Undefeated
The Kennedy Center recently announced that the band responsible for classics such as “Shining Star,” “That’s the Way of the World,” and “September” is one of this year’s honorees. Founded by Maurice White, Earth, Wind & Fire is the first R&B vocal group and the fourth band overall — joining The Who, Led Zeppelin and The Eagles — to be honored. And in June, Phillip Bailey, 68, released his 12th solo album and his first full-length set in 17 years. Recorded over two years, “Love Will Find a Way” skyrocketed to No. 1 on the Billboard Jazz Chart for the week of July 6. Read more
Muhammad Ali, like you’ve never seen him before. By Kyle Almond / CNN
No one covered Ali for as long as The Courier-Journal, Louisville’s daily newspaper. It followed him for nearly six decades, going all the way back to when he was 12 and won his first Golden Gloves bout. “Man, he was our guy,” said C. Thomas Hardin, who was the Courier-Journal’s director of photography from 1975 to 1993. Hardin photographed Ali many times in his career, and his shots are among those in the photo book “Picture: Muhammed Ali — A Rare Glimpse into the Life of the Champ.” Read more
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