Featured
The Cherry Tree and the Crisis of American Character. By Ronald J. Sheehy, Editor / Race Inquiry Digest
For generations, American children—Black and white—were taught the classic fable of young George Washington and the cherry tree. As the story goes, Washington’s father discovered his prized tree chopped down and confronted his son: “George, did you cut down my cherry tree?” The boy, still holding the hatchet he had been given as a gift, could have deflected or lied. Instead, he reportedly met his father’s gaze and declared, “I cannot tell a lie. I did cut it with my hatchet.”
The story is entirely fictional—Parson Weems invented it in the early 19th century. Yet the myth endured because it expressed a civic ideal Americans wanted to believe about themselves: that honesty, integrity, and moral courage were foundational to leadership and citizenship. At its heart, the cherry-tree tale was not about Washington but about us—who we hoped to be as a nation. Read more
A Lesson in Character. By Ronald J. Sheehy, Editor / Race Inquiry Digest
Dr. Benjamin Elijah Mays, former president of Morehouse College, a towering figure in American education and civil rights, profoundly understood that character is the foundation upon which true leadership and social progress are built.
Character is often defined by inner traits like honesty, integrity, compassion, and courage, which guide a person’s decisions and actions. Many of Trump’s policies and executive orders are informed by his lack of character. Read more
The Week’s Top Stories
Political / Social
Why Doesn’t Trump Pay a Political Price for His Racism? By Adam Serwer / The Atlantic
During a White House meeting on Tuesday, surrounded by his Cabinet, President Donald Trump referred to Somali immigrants as “garbage” and said, “We don’t want them in our country.” No one in Trump’s Cabinet stood up to this expression of gutter racism, although Vice President J. D. Vance enthusiastically banged on the table.
Watching Trump’s repeated attacks on Somalians—the latest group of Black immigrants to be targeted by the president—I can’t avoid the conclusion that the government of the United States of America is in the hands of people who believe that they can apply a genetic hierarchy to humanity, and that American laws and customs should recognize and serve that hierarchy. Read more
Related: A Desperate Trump Is Stirring Up Race Hatred. By Chris Lehmann / The Nation
Related: The Radical Honesty of Trump’s Racist New Asylum Policy. By Melissa Gira Grant / TNR
Related: How Trump Is Using Claims of Antisemitism to End Free Speech. By Mattea Kramer / The Nation
Watch “When the Military Loses Faith in the President (w/ Mark Hertling)” on YouTube
Bill Kristol and General Mark Hertling discuss the sudden early retirement of Admiral Alvin Holsey raising concerns about U.S. military strikes in the Caribbean.
Also, the legality and ethics of the attacks, the lack of oversight, and what Hosley’s departure reveals about deepening civil-military tensions within the administration. Watch here
Related: Pete Hegseth’s Caribbean lawlessness. Editorial Board / Wash Post
Related: Pete Hegseth Should Be Charged With Murder. By Elie Mystal / The Nation
Supreme Court allows Texas to use a congressional map favorable to Republicans in 2026. By Mark Sherman / AP
A divided Supreme Court on Thursday came to the rescue of Texas Republicans, allowing next year’s elections to be held under the state’s congressional redistricting plan favorable to the GOP and pushed by President Donald Trump despite a lower-court ruling that the map likely discriminates on the basis of race.
With conservative justices in the majority, the court acted on an emergency request from Texas for quick action because qualifying in the new districts already has begun, with primary elections in March. Read more
Related: How John Roberts Brought Back Donald Trump. By Pema Levy / Mother Jones
Federal Immigration Agents Arrive in New Orleans. Eduardo Medina, Hamed Aleaziz and
It is unclear how long the effort will last in Louisiana, where the Republican governor has welcomed the agents with open arms even as immigrant communities fear what might come.
Federal Border Patrol agents began dispersing across immigrant enclaves in the New Orleans area on Wednesday, the latest front in the Trump administration’s crackdown. Read more
Here’s why Latino voters are turning away from Trump. By Alex Samuels / Daily Kos
We already knew Latino voters were drifting from President Donald Trump, pushed not just by his hard-edged deportation agenda—firing tear gas at families, kids detained during school hours, courthouse arrests—but by the broader climate of fear his immigration machinery produces.
However, new polling points to a sharper, more immediate reason for the shift: Trump has made daily life punishingly expensive, and Latino voters are feeling the pinch. Read more
Education
School Integration Has Lost Steam. Will Mamdani Revive It in New York? By Troy Closson / NYT
Mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani has spoken about integrating America’s largest education system in striking terms rarely heard from big city leaders.
He will soon lead one of the country’s most diverse cities, home to the nation’s largest school system — one in which nearly 900,000 students speak more than 180 different languages. Though Mr. Mamdani’s mayoral campaign shared only a limited vision for public education, he was the only candidate who ran in the general election to identify integration as a priority. Read more
Billionaire Michael Bloomberg’s Plan To Bring Charter Schools To Stillman College, Tuskegee University—And HBCUs Nationwide. ByAsia Alexander / Forbes
Michael Bloomberg, who donated $600 million in 2024 to support medical schools at four historically Black colleges and universities (HBCUs), has a new plan to back Black education: Funding K-12 charter schools on HBCU campuses.
On Thursday, the billionaire former New York City mayor’s Bloomberg Philanthropies and the education nonprofit City Fund announced a $20 million initiative to fund two public schools in Alabama, one at Stillman College and one at Tuskegee University, that will create direct pipelines into HBCUs and promote career success. Read more
Related: Robert F. Smith Launches Generative AI Programs at Morehouse and Spelman / Eurweb
University of Alabama shutters Black, female student magazines. By AP and Politico
The University of Alabama has suspended the publication of two student-run magazines — one primarily focused on Black students and another on women’s issues — citing recent federal guidance against diversity, equity and inclusion programs on college campuses.
The editors of Nineteen Fifty-Six and Alice magazines were informed Monday that the university was stopping the magazines immediately. A university official cited July guidance from Attorney General Pamela Bondi on what the Trump administration considered unlawful discrimination at institutions that receive federal funding, according to one of the editors. Read more
Associate Provost on the Right’s Coordinated Attack on Academic Freedom. By Emma Whitfford / Inside Higher Ed.
Valerie Johnson has watched—and fought against—political attacks on academic freedom for years. A political scientist and associate provost of diversity, equity and inclusion at the Catholic DePaul University, Johnson understands well the political incentives for conservatives to bring universities to heel.
In her book The Right to Learn, Valerie Johnson dives into the years-long erosion of academic freedom in red states and how universities must resist it. In October, Johnson’s book was granted the American Association of Colleges and Universities’ Frederic W. Ness Book Award. Read more
Private school vouchers in Florida redirecting funding away from public schools. By Kaitlyn McCormack / WUSF
Florida’s expansion of vouchers for families who want to enroll their children in private schools is leading to tighter budgets at public schools across the state.
In 2023, the Republican-led Legislature passed a bill that eliminated the income requirement for families to receive the vouchers, called family empowerment scholarships and Florida tax credit scholarships. These vouchers, intended to help families who could not afford private education, allow for public state aid to be redirected to families to cover the costs of the private school. Read more
World
Why Bill Gates Blames Trump’s ‘Gigantic Mistake’ For Surge In Child Deaths. By Sara Dorn / Forbes
Bill Gates criticized the Trump administration’s dismantling of the U.S. Agency for International Development as a “gigantic mistake” that contributed to a rise in child deaths for the first time in decades, according to a report released Thursday from the Gates Foundation.
The report found about 200,000 more children under the age of five could die this year than in 2024, according to the Gates Foundation’s annual Goalkeepers Report assessing the progress of the United Nations’ Sustainable Development goals . Read more
Trump Immigration Ploy Is A Return To Racial Control Policies. By Anoa Changa / Newsone
The so-called “third world” ban the Trump administration has placed on migration is not about security. It is about control.
It is about preserving a white supremacist vision of America — one that sees Black, Brown, and Asian immigrants not as contributors, but as contaminants. Using the pretense of the D.C. shooter being from Afghanistan, the Trump administration has begun taking actions against long-term residents and others protected by programs like the Temporary Protected Status (or TPS), including Haitians, Venezuelans, Somalis, and Afghans. Read more
The genocide in Gaza is far from over. By Raz Segal / The Guardian
On 10 October, following two years of Israeli genocide that have turned Gaza into the new benchmark of total destruction, after Israel has killed and injured hundreds of thousands of Palestinians and inflicted on all the people in Gaza “severe bodily or mental harm,” to quote from the United Nations Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide, the Trump administration imposed a ceasefire, giving rise to the idea that the Gaza war has ended.
The ceasefire, however, seems to be designed mostly to move forward with the business deals of the mega rich in the Middle East, and the fire has never ceased: the Israeli government has continued its assault, killing and injuring hundreds of Palestinians since 10 October, destroying thousands of homes and buildings, and blocking the entry of sufficient aid. Read more
Putin warns Europe: if you want war, then Russia will defeat you. By Vladimir Soldatkin / Reuters
President Vladimir Putin warned European powers on Tuesday that if they started a war with Russia then Moscow was ready to fight and that the defeat of European powers would be so absolute that there would be no one left to even negotiate a peace deal.
Almost four years into the war in Ukraine, the deadliest conflict in Europe since World War Two, Russia has failed to conquer the country, a much smaller neighbour which has been supported by European powers and the United States. Read more
Ethics / Morality / Religion
For Catholics, mass deportations are immoral. By David Lantigua / NCR
Mass deportation is immoral and unjust. It is a grave evil for several reasons. U.S. Catholic bishops recently delivered a special message against “the indiscriminate mass deportation of people.” Pope Leo XIV has expressed his support of the message for all Catholics and people of goodwill during these terrifying holidays for millions living, working and providing for their families.
First and foremost, it is a direct attack on the family — the principal organic unit of any society, regardless of citizenship status. Children are ripped apart from their parents and spouses from each other. This reality is not the exception but the norm of mass deportation, which deploys indiscriminate force against the livelihood of undocumented people for the purposes of instilling fear and punishing “criminals.” Read more
The social gospel of the streets: A review of City of Dignity. By Heath W. Carter / The Christian Century
Progressive Christians who find themselves caught in a powerful tractor beam of despair would do well to pick up a copy of City of Dignity.
Sean Dempsey tells the story of liberal Christians—Protestant and Catholic, Black and White and Latino—who fought for justice in late 20th-century Los Angeles. They did not win every battle, but their moral and theological witness often broke through, capturing the attention and arousing the conscience of people all over the country and world. Read more
Muslim students warn of spate of harassment by far-right Christian agitators. By Ulaa Kuziez / RNS
Over the last two months, at least seven Muslim student groups in the U.S. have been harassed by right-wing Christian activists, said Mohamad Altabaa, a Texas student who is tracking harassment cases.
Their goal, he said, is to provoke students, film and post their reactions, and falsely portray Muslims as violent. His research suggests the same group is traveling to different parts of the country to disrupt Muslim students using similar tactics and phrases. Read more
Historical / Cultural
America stares down erasure of Black history and progress. By Delano Massey / Axios
In the past year, federal, state and institutional decisions have gutted major pillars of America’s civil rights protections and racial equity infrastructure, wiping away public data, slashing research funding and erasing Black history.
Why it matters: Taken together, these moves amount to an unprecedented rollback of civil rights progress, historians say — the largest since Reconstruction. Zoom in: Effects are piling up. Read more
What Rosa Parks can teach us about resistance today. By Jan-Werner Muller / The Guardian
It was 70 years ago when four African Americans were sitting in the fifth row of a bus in Montgomery. As one white man had to stand towards the front, the driver asked the four to get up and move towards the back of the bus. Three did; one did not – the rest is history. Or so many American kids might think when they first read the story of Rosa Parks in school.
It is a story of courage, but, lest one forget, it is also a story about breaking the law. And the question for us today is what civil disobedience means in an era when the federal government is signaling its readiness severely to punish even perfectly legal dissent. Read more
Haunted by History, Japanese Americans Fight Trump’s Immigration Crackdown. Jill Cowan / NYT
Japanese Americans are seeing parallels between the government’s incarceration of their families during World War II and the current detention of Latinos.
From the passenger seat of a sky blue Prius, Amy Oba craned her neck to get a look at the federal detention center, a hulking tower surrounded by a black chain-link fence and laced with barbed wire. On a recent evening, she was on patrol, part of a group of Japanese Americans who are keeping a watchful eye on the actions of immigration agents in Los Angeles. Read more
‘Becoming Thurgood’: How Marshall became ‘Mr. Civil Rights’ and a Supreme Court icon. By Ken Makin / CSMonitor
Thurgood Marshall’s place in history and policy-shaping decisions are legendary. The country’s first African American Supreme Court justice, who was known as “Mr. Civil Rights,” argued on behalf of the NAACP in the landmark Brown v. Board of Education case in front of the Supreme Court. Years later, he would be appointed to that same iconic bench.
A documentary, “Becoming Thurgood: America’s Social Architect,” which is now streaming on PBS, looks at more than the case and the court that defines him. It studies his roots, which include his Baltimore birthplace and the roles of historically Black colleges in shaping his politics and worldview. His mentor, Charles Hamilton Houston, offered a sharp quote on the career path of an attorney: “A lawyer is either a social engineer or a parasite on society.” Read more
Sports
Can Chris Paul help any NBA team? Here are 5 potential landing spots. By Zack Harper / The Athletic
The LA Clippers aren’t having an amazing start to the season. They’ve been horrendous on the court after a promising 2024-25 campaign, not to mention the allegations and investigation surrounding potential salary-cap circumvention with Kawhi Leonard looming over them. And now, it looks like they’ve handled the final season of Chris Paul’s Hall of Fame career poorly.
CP3 posted on an Instagram story early Wednesday with the text “Just Found Out I’m Being Sent Home.” Then, news broke that the Clippers are parting ways with Paul, with team president Lawrence Frank saying in a statement that LA “will work with him on the next step of his career.” For Paul, who announced last month that he’d retire after this season, that’s not exactly the storybook ending he was hoping for . Read more
Michael Jordan’s fight against NASCAR heads to court. By AP and NPR
Michael Jordan’s bitter fight against NASCAR heads to federal court Monday in a jury trial that could rip apart the top motorsports series in the United States.
The antitrust allegations leveled by Jordan-owned 23XI Racing and Front Row Motorsports has exposed salacious personal communications, NASCAR’s finances and a deep contempt between some of the top executives in the sport and its participants. Read more
Shai Gilgeous-Alexander matching Wilt Chamberlain highlights historic calendar year. By James Jackson / NYT
On a point-by-point basis, Shai Gilgeous-Alexander routinely places himself alongside NBA greats. His midrange mastery reminds many of Michael Jordan and Kobe Bryant. The fluidity and creativity of his drives to the rim are reminiscent of his childhood hoops idol, Allen Iverson.
On Sunday, against the Portland Trail Blazers, the 27-year-old Gilgeous-Alexander continued etching his name into NBA lore with his 93rd consecutive 20-point game, surpassing the late, great Wilt Chamberlain for the second-longest such streak in league history. Read more
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