Featured
Who We Are: A Chronicle of Racism in America movie review. By Roger Ebert
A recurring visual utilized by speaker Jeffery Robinson in Emily and Sarah Kunstler’s sobering documentary, “Who We Are: A Chronicle of Racism in America” is that of a ball reaching a tipping point, mere centimeters away from achieving real progress until it is forced to slide backward.
“Who We Are” should be made required viewing in every American school as we find ourselves perched, once again, at a pivotal tipping point. The hope found in activists of all races demonstrating together in the midst of a pandemic is underlined by the joyous gospel music over the end credits. It is Robinson’s aim to guide our eye in seeing the truth of our past that is so often overlooked. This is perhaps most indelibly expressed by the fingerprints left in walls throughout Charleston by the enslaved people who built our cities, our economy and our country, brick by brick. Now streaming on Netflix. Read more
Related: Watch “WHO WE ARE | Official Trailer (2022)” on YouTube.
Political / Social
In the Georgia Senate Runoff, People Power Beats Voter Suppression. Amy Goodman and Denis Moynihan / Democracy Now
“There are those who would look at the outcome of this race and say that there’s no voter suppression in Georgia,” Warnock continued. “Let me be clear, just because people endured long lines that wrapped around buildings, some blocks long, just because they endured the rain and the cold and all kinds of tricks in order to vote, doesn’t mean that voter suppression does not exist. It simply means that you, the people, have decided that your voices will not be silenced.” Read more
Related: Unapologetic Black Power in the South. By Charles M. Blow / NYT
The Trump paradox: America is sick of this guy — but we can’t afford to turn away. By Chauncey Devega / Salon
Yes, Trump craves attention and suffers without it. But pretending he isn’t there won’t make him go away.
To ignore danger is a particular and peculiar type of privilege. Generally speaking, it belongs to the rich and powerful, and to others who believe that because of their skin color, their gender or other types of societal advantages they are immune from perils that may terrify others. This is to expected: the rich and powerful literally do not live in the same reality as everyone else; in some versions of the future, they may not even live on the same planet. Read more
Next generation of Black leaders eye Virginia special election. By Ryan Nobles / NBC News
Virginia will have a special election in February to fill the seat of the late Rep. Donald McEachin, D-Va., and already two prominent state Democrats have jumped into the race. Shown is Rep. Donald McEachin, D-Va., who speaks at a rally for presidential candidate Joe Biden in Norfolk, Va., on March 1, 2020.
Republican Gov. Glenn Youngkin announced Monday that Virginia will hold a special election Feb. 21 to fill the seat of Democratic Rep. Donald McEachin, 61, who represented the 4th District until his death from cancer last month. The unexpected opening in the majority-minority Democratic district — which is based in and around Richmond and extends to the North Carolina border — is already attracting interest from prominent Democrats who are part of a new generation of Black leaders in the state. Read more
Karen Bass takes over a Los Angeles divided by crisis. By Reis Thebault / Wash Post
As Bass prepares to take office Monday, she has made audacious promises to the city’s 4 million residents, pledging to address the interlocking crises of homelessness, affordability and inequity, problems that have grown more acute in recent years despite the efforts of a string of previous mayors. “If we just focus on bringing people inside and comprehensively addressing their needs and moving them to permanent housing with a way to pay their bills, we will save lives and we will save our city,” Bass said in her inaugural address, held in a soaring theater in downtown Los Angeles. “And this is my mission as your mayor.” Read more
Biden signs historic bill codifying same-sex and interracial marriage. By Myah Ward and Eun Kyung Kim / Politico
With his signature, the president cemented his legacy as a champion of LGBTQ rights.
A decade after he surprised the nation by publicly throwing his support behind same-sex marriage, President Joe Biden on Tuesday signed the Respect for Marriage Act into law at a White House ceremony — cementing his legacy as a champion of LGBTQ rights. The celebration was a full-circle moment for the nation’s oldest sitting president, a fitting bookend to his decadeslong personal evolution on same-sex marriage. Several thousands of advocates and other attendees joined the president and congressional leaders for a sunny but chilly afternoon on the South Lawn to watch Biden sign legislation that codified same-sex and interracial marriage into law. Read more
Taking Our School Boards Back. By Jennifer Job / The Progressive
Board meetings in North Carolina’s largest school district, like others around the country, have been dominated by hostile rightwing ‘activists.’ Then local progressives stepped in.
Rather than growing from a genuinely grassroots campaign around local issues, Moms for Liberty is a heavily funded, strategically targeted weapon against public schools. Using “parental rights” as a rallying cry, the group pulls parents in with fearmongering about critical race theory, LGBTQ+ rights, and COVID-19 precautions. Read more
Racism hides in your home value, as I’m discovering moving my family. By Jemar Tisby / Courier Journal
As a historian, I know part of these differences are due to historical policies that segregated Louisville’s neighborhoods along racial lines, ensuring white residents lived in larger houses in neighborhoods with less pollution, less poverty, more services and more amenities. Yet, a recent report using brand new data, found that neither historical racist policies nor contemporary socioeconomic differences can explain the gap between Louisville appraisal values. Read more
Does diversity training work? We don’t know — and here is why. By Betsy Levy Paluck / Wash Post
In early June 2020, as Black Lives Matter protests flowered across the United States following the murder of George Floyd, businesses and other institutions rushed to enhance their diversity efforts. Chief diversity officer hires tripled among the largest publicly traded companies, enhancing diversity, equity and inclusion offerings for which U.S. companies paid an estimated $3.4 billion to outside firms that year. What have we achieved with all this effort? In 2022, this question has special significance, as measures to increase diversity and racial equity have come under political attack, often by people who believe those shouldn’t be goals in the first place. Read more
Historical / Cultural
Virginia Capital Removes Its Final Confederate Monument. By AP and HuffPost
The statue in Richmond, which depicts General A.P. Hill, will be given to the Black History Museum and Cultural Center of Virginia.
The city of Richmond — the capital of the Confederacy for most of the Civil War — removed its last city-owned Confederate statue on Monday, more than two years after it began to purge itself of what many saw as painful symbols of racial oppression. Read more
Julia W. Garnet’s Civil War Activism. By Holly A. Pinheiro, Jr. / AAIHS
Black women (such as Emilie Frances Davis) made sacrifices that were critical to the US’s wartime mobilization efforts and Black people’s aspirations for a more racially inclusive society that included destroying the institution of slavery. Black women’s socio-political activism publicly demonstrated a nuanced understanding of the war’s profound and damaging impact on various Black communities. Black women joined the Underground Railroad or religious organizations to protect the lives and rights of numerous Black refugees as they sojourned to their new living situations. Read more
Emmett Till: National park honor could save legacy, provide healing. By Marc Ramirez / USA Today
It’s one of the United States’ most infamous hate crimes, the spark of the modern civil rights movement – and yet, sites associated with the murder of 14-year-old Emmett Till have gone largely unmarked or left to ruin. Preserving Till’s legacy – and structures critical to telling his story – is what some aim to achieve by persuading President Joe Biden to use his executive powers to create a national park honoring the Black child from Chicago and his mother, Mamie Till-Mobley. Read more
John Lewis stamp: Civil rights hero to be honored next year. By
The Georgia Democrat, who dedicated his life to activism and spent more than three decades in Congress fighting for civil rights, will be featured on a stamp using a photograph taken for a 2013 issue of Time magazine, USPS said in a statement. The photograph was taken by Marco Grob. A follower and colleague of Martin Luther King Jr., Lewis participated in lunch counter sit-ins, joined the Freedom Riders in challenging segregated buses and, at 23, was a keynote speaker at the historic 1963 March on Washington. Read more
The Only People They Hit Were Black’: When a Race Riot Roiled New York.
On the evening of Sept. 8, 1976, a race riot roiled Washington Square Park, and the city itself. The bloodshed lasted no more than 10 minutes, and has somehow receded from history. But today, more than four decades later, the root causes of the violence, and its fractious aftermath, are no less relevant. It’s a case that offers instructive reminders: of a different sort of “gang violence”; of a city rife with racist enmities and neighborhood loyalties; of allegations of police complicity; of the long-held distrust of any municipal authority among the city’s Black and Hispanic residents. Read more
“Lowndes County and the Road to Black Power”: New Film on Radical Voting Activism in 1960s Alabama. By Sam Pollard and Geeta Gandbhir / Democracy Now
We look at “Lowndes County and the Road to Black Power,” a remarkable new documentary that shows how a small rural community in Alabama organized during the civil rights movement to challenge white supremacy and systematic disenfranchisement of Black residents, and would become, in some ways, the first iteration of the Black Panther Party. Read more and listen here.
Wendell Pierce on bringing a Black Willy Loman to life, making “Death of a Salesman” relevant today. By D. Watkins
Salon sits down with the Broadway actor and “The Wire” star to discuss the American Dream and Black Americans
“Here’s a 97-year-old Black man who had seen it all and he’s watching his son on Broadway. Even at this point in his life when he was so adamantly against me becoming an actor, and it was out of love,” Pierce said. “I look at my forefathers and mothers who have loved this country so much in times when this country didn’t love them back. I said that to my father on opening night. He loved this country when this country didn’t love him back.” Read more
Sports
Phoenix Mercury star Brittney Griner’s recovery will be unique as a Black LGBTQ+ woman and high-profile athlete. By Sean Hurd / Andscape
Mental health experts describe what the WNBA center will need as she processes the trauma of her detainment in Russia
After 294 days of being detained by the Russian government, Olympic champion and Phoenix Mercury star center Brittney Griner has been released and is back in the United States. It was announced early Thursday morning that the United States and Russia had agreed to a prisoner swap leading to the release of Griner in exchange for Viktor Bout, a Russian arms dealer. Griner’s plane landed in San Antonio early Friday. Read more
Serena Williams Feels Your Pain, And She’s Launching A Company To Soothe It. By Kerry A. Dolan / Forbes
Serena Williams knows what it’s like to feel sore. She played professional tennis for nearly three decades, ending her career in August at the age of 40. But, she says, she never found a remedy she could count on.
So she added another title to her illustrious resume: cofounder of Will Perform, which targets physical recovery from workouts with products for topical pain relief and muscle and skin care. Think newer, cooler-looking, nicer-smelling, slightly more expensive versions of BioFreeze and Icy Hot, her competitors in the estimated $1 billion industry. Will Perform launches Thursday. Read more
‘Grails: When Sneakers Changed the Game’ is really about social and cultural change in golf. By Marcus Shorter / Andscape
Hulu docuseries examines Eastside Golf’s plans for expanding the sport in the Black community
The series details how Olajuwon Ajanaku and Earl A. Cooper filled a gap in golf apparel through their company, Eastside Golf, and their partnership with Jordan Brand. Through interviews with Ajanaku, Cooper, and Jordan Brand employees, along with a few choice celebrities and sneaker enthusiasts, the first two of six episodes explain sneaker culture, golf tradition, and the importance of a co-sign from brand owner Michael Jordan. Read more
NBA renames its MVP trophy after Michael Jordan. By Christopher Brito / CBS News
The NBA has renamed its coveted most valuable player award after Michael Jordan – widely considered to be the best basketball player to ever hit the hardwood. The NBA announced the new Jordan trophy as part of six newly designed trophies named after the league’s legends. The 24-inch tall bronze trophy commemorating the basketball icon features a player breaking out of a rock and reaching for a crystal basketball. According to the NBA, the trophy’s reach “symbolizes an MVP’s endless chase for greatness.” Read more
The NFL loves ‘quarterback whisperers.’ Why doesn’t it love Jim Caldwell? By Michael Lee and Sally Jenkins / Wash Post
As NFL owners increasingly turn to young, White offensive ‘gurus,’ the coach who mentored Peyton Manning, Matthew Stafford and Joe Flacco is out of a job. Shown is Former Detroit Lions head coach Jim Caldwell (AJ Mast/AP)
The NFL has spent more than a century struggling to embrace Black men as leaders — first in helmets and now in headsets. A recent analysis by The Washington Post found that Black coaches receive iniquitous treatment in both hiring and retention: They face narrower paths to the job than their White counterparts and are fired more quickly even when they win more games. Read more
Site Information
Articles appearing in the Digest are archived on our home page. And at the top of this page register your email to receive notification of new editions of Race Inquiry Digest.
Click here for earlier Digests. The site is searchable by name or topic. See “search” at the top of this page.
About Race Inquiry and Race Inquiry Digest. The Digest is published on Mondays and Thursdays.
Use the customized buttons below to share the Digest in an email, or post to your Facebook, Linkedin or Twitter accounts.