Featured
The Origins of Herschel Walker’s Complicated Views on Race. By Michael Kruse / Politico
He has often remained silent when asked to take sides. Running for Senate in Georgia, that might not be possible.
In the spring of 1980, in this little, isolated place in rural, middle Georgia, Black people clamored for equality and white people beat them with fists and sticks and chains. Bigots called Black protesters soulless animals and cannibals, brandished Confederate battle flags and sent shotgun blasts into Black families’ homes. Pastors and activists registered voters, and sued the sheriff and other local lawmen, and they marched. “Fired up!” hundreds chanted, walking four abreast from a Black church to the courthouse in the central square. “Can’t take no more!”
For days, then weeks, then months, so many people in a town of 2,500 were swept up in the unrest, with one particularly notable exception — the area’s most prominent Black resident, almost certainly its most prominent citizen, period. Herschel Walker. Walker, of course, is the famous former football player who is the top Republican candidate running for the United States Senate in this politically pivotal terrain. The polling and fundraising leader, Walker, 59, is endorsed by both Donald Trump and Mitch McConnell. Read more
Political / Social
The Trump Conspiracy Is Hiding in Plain Sight. By Jamelle Bouie / NYT
Antebellum pro-slavery radicals spoke freely of secession and violence; Democratic Party paramilitaries planned their attacks on Reconstruction governments in public view; and the men who codified segregation into Jim Crow did so in the open. Bad actors, in other words, do not always make their plans in secret. When people plot to do wrong, they often do so in plain sight. To the extent that they succeed, it is at least partly because no one took them as seriously as they should have. And so it goes with the plot to restore Donald Trump to power over and against the will of the voters. Read more
Related: How Saboteurs Took Over the G.O.P. By Paul Krugman / NYT
Will Supreme Court conservatives overturn Roe? Their casual contempt for women is not a good sign. By Amanda Marcotte / Salon
Wednesday’s oral arguments were full of contempt for women’s lives, contempt for women’s intelligence, contempt for women’s privacy and contempt for women’s very humanity. To be sure, Center for Reproductive Rights lawyer Julie Rikelman and Solicitor General Elizabeth Prelogar repeatedly emphasized that women are complex human beings who have as much a right to liberty and the pursuit of happiness as anyone. But it was like talking to a brick wall of misogyny offered by the Republican appointees on the bench. The Court now seems almost certain, as was requested by Mississippi Attorney General Scott Stewart, to overturn Roe v. Wade next year. Read more
What Stacey Abrams’ announcement means for Georgia and America. By Peniel E. Joseph / CNN
Stacey Abrams’ 2022 campaign for Georgia governor represents a generational opportunity for Black women in American politics. It’s a potential game-changer for parts of the South that continue to rely on voter suppression to retain power. Abrams, who announced on her candidacy Wednesday on Twitter, is easily the highest-profile Black female political leader in the country who does not currently hold elected office. Abrams’ brilliance as a service-oriented leader, former elected official and voting-rights advocate places her in a long unbroken line of Black women organizers and activists who have sought to reimagine American democracy. Read more
Related: 2ndA Stacey Abrams governor bid sees new tests, intrigues. By Jeff AMY / AP and ABC News
What the heck is going on with Kamala Harris? By Chris Cillizza / CNN
In the space of the last two weeks, Vice President Kamala Harris has lost two of her senior aides. First, just before Thanksgiving, news broke that Ashley Etienne, Harris’ communications director, would be leaving the vice president’s office. Then, on Wednesday night, CNN reported that Symone Sanders, Harris’ chief spokesperson and a senior adviser, is also headed out the door. Harris allies quickly moved to explain both of these departures away as long-planned and not part of any sort of problem within the Veep’s office. Read more
The Ongoing Toll of Segregation. By Richard D. Kahlenberg / TNR
Sheryll Cashin’s “White Space, Black Hood” shows how economic discrimination combines with racial injustice in America’s housing policy.
Dismantling segregation in the United States has proven exceedingly difficult. In 1966, when Martin Luther King Jr. and fellow marchers were pelted with rocks and bottles in a fair housing demonstration in Chicago, King said he saw a level of hatred far greater than in campaigns for voting rights or nondiscrimination in employment. King persisted, Sheryll Cashin writes in her searing new book, White Space, Black Hood, because he and others knew that housing segregation was the fountainhead of so many other inequities, including unequal access to good schools, jobs, health care, safe neighborhoods, and fair policing. Read more
City polls find views on treatment over race vary between Black, white. By David Paleologos / USA Today
The way we most commonly picture racism occurring in our minds is at the flashpoint of life-changing experiences: A police officer in action making a split-second decision in a life-or-death situation…a real estate broker deciding which homes to show a family…a manager deciding which candidate to hire for a role. But another way to conceptualize racism is that people, over time, form views and opinions about the world around them that heavily influences the outcome of those quick moments. The entirety of the police officer’s and the Black suspect’s life experiences intersect for that one short moment. The same is true of the real estate broker and the Black family, and the manager choosing between white and Black candidates. Read more
New report reveals the deep-rooted racism plaguing U.S. military academies. By Meaghan Ellis /Alternet
Over the last 70 years, the United States military academies criteria have undergone drastic policy changes to improve diversity. Now, many military academies are opening their doors to both men and women of different ethnicities, creeds, and sexual orientations. However, racism remains an issue within the United States services’ officer corps — the academies of the U.S. Army, the U.S. Navy, the U.S. Air Force, the U.S. Coast Guard, and U.S. Merchant Marine, according to The Associated Press. Read more
If first-graders are old enough to use racial slurs, they’re not ‘too young’ to learn about racism. By Candace Howze / Wash Post
When I hear parents argue that their school-age children are “too young” to learn about race, I’m baffled. That’s one of the arguments voiced by parents in a recent CBS News documentary, “The Trials of Critical Race Theory,” about the current fight over how and whether race and racism should be taught in schools. “I don’t want them to see racism yet — to engage, to learn racism,” Robin Steenman, a member of Moms for Liberty — which fashions itself a “parental rights” group — says in the documentary. She adds: “We feel that’s too heavy for a second-grader.” No one wants a child to suffer from exposure to racism. But how can a second-grader be too young to learn about race when first-graders have called my students the n-word? Read more
Related: Watch “The Trials of Critical Race Theory | CBSN Originals” on YouTube
Member of ‘Jena Six’ speaks out on race and the justice system 15 years later.
Bryant Purvis was just 17 when he became a part of the “Jena Six.”He and five other Black teens were accused and later convicted of attacking a white student at a high school in Jena, Louisiana, a town with a large majority of white residents, after a series of racially charged incidents there. Purvis, now 32, maintains he was not involved in the fight. He has since dedicated his time talking to students about racial injustice as a motivational speaker. He also authored the book, “My Story as a Jena 6,” in 2015, but is now focused on his future beyond the “Jena Six” label. Read more
Historical / Cultural
‘Spirit of resistance’: Marking 500 years since the first slave revolt in the Americas. By
Five hundred years ago this month, the Americas saw its first revolt of enslaved people, when Black Africans rose up against colonial powers in the Caribbean. Historians believe the Santo Domingo Slave Revolt took place on Dec. 26, 1521, starting at a sugar plantation owned by Diego Columbus, son of Christopher Columbus. He was governor of La Española, the present-day Dominican Republic and Haiti, according to a monograph on the revolt published by the CUNY Dominican Studies Institute (DSI) at the City College of New York. Read more
Nevada governor apologizes for state’s past role in Indigenous schools. By AP and NPR
The Stewart School in Carson City is among more than 350 residential schools that the U.S. Interior Department plans to examine as part of the Federal Boarding School Initiative Review, which includes an investigation into student deaths and known and possible burial sites. On Friday, Nevada Gov. Steve Sisolak heard stories from tribal elders about the school’s history. The governor, tribal leaders, state agency heads and Interior officials discussed ways the state — which funded the school’s construction and helped gather children to send there — can contribute to the federal efforts to confront historic injustices and intergenerational trauma and honor the children who died at boarding schools. Read more
Descendants of Marcus Garvey press Biden for posthumous pardon. By DeNeen L. Brown
Denzel Washington, Man on Fire. By Maureen Dowd / NYT
When Denzel Washington and Frances McDormand began rehearsing to play the Macbeths, he asked her how she thought the couple had met. Oh, she replied blithely, the Macbeths met when they were 15. They were Romeo and Juliet, but they didn’t commit suicide. They just stayed married for 50 years. But they didn’t have any kids and his career stalled, so thinking legacy, they suddenly went gangster and killed their nice, old friend, the king. “This is one of the only good marriages in Shakespeare,” said Joel Coen, who adapted and directed “The Tragedy of Macbeth,” opening widely on Christmas Day. “They just happen to be plotting a murder.” Read more
He put the R in rock ‘n’ roll: Remembering Little Richard. By Denise Oliver-Velez / Daily Kos
As the end of 2021 draws near, I have been thinking about jazz and soul musicians we lost this year While browsing through the memorial tribute I wrote in 2020, which was headed with this photo, I realized that I have never featured Richard Wayne Penniman, who the world knew as Little Richard, born on December 5, 1932, in Macon, Georgia.o for today’s Black Music Sunday I invite you to join me in celebrating a man whose impact on R&B, soul, and rock ‘n’ roll should never be overlooked or underestimated—though far too often his imitators and borrowers are credited with what he pioneered. Read more
Sports
‘Citizen Ashe’ explores Arthur Ashe’s activism and patriotism. By Jerry Bemberry / The Undefeated
While the tennis success of Ashe has been widely documented — he remains the only Black male tennis player to win singles titles at the US Open (1968), the Australian Open (1970) and Wimbledon (1975) — Citizen Ashe deeply explores Ashe’s life as an activist and as a patriot (Ashe was commissioned as a second lieutenant in the United States Army and was assigned to the U.S. Military Academy at West Point at the time he won his first Grand Slam title at the 1968 US Open). The 95-minute documentary will be released theatrically this month (on Friday in New York, Dec. 10 in Los Angeles). The film will later have its broadcast premiere on CNN before landing on HBO Max next summer. Read more
Once shut out of the Hall of Fame, these Black ballplayers are getting another shot. By Michael Lee / Wash Post
Shown is Buck O’Neil who was denied a spot in the Baseball Hall of Fame in 2006 and died shortly afterward. He has another chance to be voted in this weekend.
Two 16-person Hall of Fame committees — the Golden Days Era committee, for 10 players whose primary contributions were from 1950 to 1969, and the Early Baseball Era committee, for seven players from before 1950 — will cast the ballots. They will be the committees’ first votes since MLB’s announcement last year that the Negro Leagues and their statistics had been elevated to major league status. To be inducted, candidates must receive 12 of 16 votes. “There’s a little crack in the door,” Kendrick said. Read more
At Jackson State, the ‘Prime Effect’ Reverberates. By Alanis Thames / NYT
Since the arrival of the university’s high-profile head football coach, the Pro Football Hall of Famer Deion Sanders, in September 2020, local businesses like Stamps, which Sanders highlighted in an Instagram post, have seen a surge in exposure and business. Jackson State’s on-field turnaround since Sanders’s arrival has been just as rapid. The program, which plays at the Football Championship Subdivision level in the Southwestern Athletic Conference, was once a perennial powerhouse among historically Black colleges and universities. It had declined in the past decade but vaulted back into national prominence this past season, largely because of Sanders. Read more
Site Information
Visit our home page for more articles, book/podcast and video favorites. 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.
About Race Inquiry and Race Inquiry Digest. The Digest is published on Mondays and Thursdays.
Use the buttons below to share the Digest in an email, or post to your Facebook, Linkedin or Twitter accounts.