Featured
Donald Trump’s fantasies of racial violence reflect an all-too-real history. By Chauncey Devega / Salon
Trump’s white supremacist rhetoric conjures up some of American history’s darkest crimes. That’s not accidental.
At his last two rallies, Trump provided a preview of that strategy, hinting that he is willing to provoke a “race war” in order to regain power and to get revenge on his real or imagined enemies. At a rally in Arizona last month, Trump told his followers this:
The left is now rationing lifesaving therapeutics based on race, discriminating against and denigrating — just, denigrating — white people to determine who lives and who dies. If you’re white you don’t get the vaccine, or if you’re white you don’t get therapeutics. It’s unbelievable to think this. And nobody wants this. Black people don’t want it, white people don’t want it, nobody wants it. … In New York state, if you’re white, you have to go to the back of the line to get medical health — think of it, if you’re white you go right to the back of the line. … This race-based medicine is not only anti-American, it’s government tyranny in the truest sense of the word. Read more
Related: One in five applicants to white supremacist group tied to US military. By Maya Yang / The Guardian
Political / Social
Supreme Court Halts Order Requiring Alabama To Redraw Congressional Map. By Nick Visser / HuffPost
The Supreme Court on Monday allowed a congressional map in Alabama to remain in place, putting on hold a lower court order that said the Republican-drawn plan violated the Voting Rights Act and disenfranchised Black voters. At issue is Alabama’s latest congressional map, drawn in November, the first to take into account the 2020 census. The map maintains just one majority Black district and six majority white districts even though the population of Black Americans in Alabama is more than 25%. The Black majority district has traditionally voted for Democrats, while the other six have voted for Republicans, meaning the shift could potentially give Democrats an additional seat in Congress. Read more
Related: No Attack on Voting Rights Is Too Racist for This Supreme Court. By Elie Mystal / The Nation
Related: Ginni and Clarence Thomas draw questions about Supreme Court ethics.
Black Lawmakers Urge DOJ To Take ‘Aggressive’ Action Against Voter Restrictions. Sarah Ruiz-Grossman / HuffPost
“The future of our democracy is at stake,” Congressional Black Caucus members wrote in a letter to the Justice Department.
More than 40 members of the Congressional Black Caucus wrote to U.S. Attorney General Merrick Garland on Tuesday, urging the Justice Department to be “relentless” in challenging state laws that restrict voting rights. The letter — led by Democratic Reps. Jim Clyburn (S.C.), Ayanna Pressley (Mass.) and Mondaire Jones (N.Y.) — was meant to communicate to the DOJ that the agency needs to “be more aggressive in its work to protect voting rights,” according to a news release from Pressley’s office. Read more
America’s political future is in Texas. But will Texas be red or blue? By Chris Chu de León / USA Today
Deep in the heart of Texas – somewhere between the starry desert nights of El Paso and the blooming sage of Beaumont – is the steady beat of profound contradictions. Despite the fact that people of color made up 95% of the population growth in the past decade, the state’s halls of power remain almost exclusively in the hands of old, white male lawmakers. Although Texas is on the cusp of turning blue, these same lawmakers banned abortion after about six weeks and restricted voting rights, culminating in possibly the most conservative legislative session in a generation. Read more
GOP Bets on Black Conservatives As Key to Victory: ‘We Change or We Die.’ By Steve Friess / Newsweek
Ten years after its “autopsy” of Mitt Romney‘s 2012 loss to Barack Obama concluded that the Republican Party’s biggest problem was its failure to appeal to voters of color, 2022 is shaping up as a breakthrough year for the GOP on at least one diversity front: Black candidates. From Georgia, where high-profile Black Republicans seek nominations for both governor and senator, to Michigan, where former Detroit Police Chief James Craig is the odds-on favorite to go up against Democratic Governor Gretchen Whitmer, to a lineup of well-funded House and Senate candidates poised to break the record for the number of Black Republicans elected to Congress, a decade-long effort to broaden the appeal of the GOP is finally bearing fruit—and could play a pivotal role in determining the outcome of the upcoming midterm elections. Read more
In his fight against ‘woke’ schools, DeSantis tears at the seams of a diverse Florida. By Tim Craig and Lori Rozsa / Wash Post
Dear White Staffers: It’s Time We Listened. By Jim Swift / The Bulwark
Judged by the demographics of the senators and representatives, the 117th Congress may be the most diverse in our nation’s history. Behind the scenes, though, congressional staffers remain overwhelmingly white. According to a 2020 report released by the Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies, highlighted in Washingtonian magazine after two groups of black Hill staffers called attention to it in an open letter,
- black Americans make up about 13 percent of the U.S. population but only 3 percent of senior Senate staff;
- the white/nonwhite ratio of the U.S. population is about 60/40, but among senior Senate staffers the white/nonwhite ratio is almost 90/10; and
- only 2 of the 100 chiefs of staff in senators’ offices in 2020 were black. Read more
After a half-century of federal oversight, segregated neighborhoods are still pervasive: ABC News analysis. By Mark Nichols / ABC News
Despite 50 years of federal oversight under the landmark Fair Housing Act of 1968, housing segregation persists in America’s largest cities and urban centers — and an exclusive ABC News analysis of mortgage-lending data shows a pattern of racial isolation remains consistent following decades of failed initiatives. The analysis shows that 20 of the nation’s top 100 metropolitan areas have an “extreme dissimilarity index” of 50 or higher — meaning at least half of the population would have had to move to another neighborhood in the area to achieve total integration in 2019. Read more
Related: How U.S. tax law widens racial wealth gap. By Megan Cerullo / CBS News
Racism and discrimination remain dangerous for Black health, wellness. By Alia E. Dastagir / USA Today
In every area of health – physical, psychological, financial and social – Black communities are worse off than their white counterparts in the United States. A fifth of Black Americans is considered in fair or poor health, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Black Americans cope with persistent racism, carry intergenerational trauma, are more likely to live in poverty, experience structural inequities in health care, and in the U.S. have experienced among the highest death tolls from COVID-19. Read more
Native Americans are an ‘untapped political force,’ which is why the GOP is fighting to stop them. By SemDem / Daily Kos
The U.S. has a long, sad history of suppressing voting rights for American Indians. States like Oklahoma demanded all of the tribe’s land, as well as dissolution of the tribe, in order to become citizens so they could vote. In addition, some states, like Minnesota, required a racist “cultural purity test” that would only allow their Indigenous population to vote if they adopted the “language, customs and habits of civilization.” Read more
1 in 10 Black people in the U.S. are immigrants, new data finds. By Claretta Bellamy / NBC News
One in 10 Black people living in the U.S. are immigrants, and the number is only expected to rise, according to new data. A Pew Research Center analysis of data from the U.S. Census Bureau and the University of Minnesota found that 4.6 million Black immigrants were living in the U.S. in 2019. That figure grew from about 800,000 in 1980. According to the report, 9.5 million Black immigrants are expected to live in the U.S. by 2060. The Black population represents all those who self-identify as Black. The analysis also found that the Black immigrant population is projected to outpace the growth of the U.S.-born Black population. This growth is fueled by the influx of individuals migrating from Africa. Read more
Once again, the police have killed a Black man for legally possessing a gun. By Eugene Robinson / Wash Post
Amir Locke, 22, was fast asleep on a couch in a Minneapolis apartment this past Wednesday morning when police barged inside and executed him. He was not even suspected of committing a crime. But he was a Black man in America in legal possession of a handgun, and that, as we know all too well, can be a capital offense. So here we are again, nearly two years after George Floyd’s murder, having to summon the energy and the outrage to engage once more in the Sisyphean quest for some semblance of racial justice in this country. How many times have we rolled this damn rock up the hill? And how many times has it rolled right back down, snuffing out the life of yet another innocent Black victim? Read more
Related: No-knock warrants in Minnesota under scrutiny after fatal police shooting.
The hate crimes trial of Ahmaud Arbery’s murderers will put racism in the spotlight. By Jamil Smith / Vox
Racist intent is what the US government will now attempt to prove in federal court in a separate, second trial against the men that began Monday with jury selection; this time, the three defendants will face federal charges alleging hate crimes, attempted kidnapping, and two firearms offenses. The difference between the Georgia murder trial and the federal hate crimes trial matters, particularly since neither race nor racism was raised as a factor by the prosecution in the murder trial, save for a mention in district attorney Linda Dunikoski’s closing statement. Howard Law School professor Justin Hansford said that amounted to a “whitewashing of this trial,” telling Vox after the verdict that the tactic played to those afraid to talk about race. The federal hate crimes charges make such avoidance impossible. Read more
Students are suspended less when their teacher has the same race or ethnicity. By Matthew Shirell / The Conversation
Black, Latino and Asian American students are less likely to be suspended from school when they have more teachers who share their racial or ethnic background. This is the central finding of a research study that two colleagues – Travis J. Bristol and Tolani Britton – and I released in October 2021 through the Annenberg Institute for School Reform at Brown University. Read more
The Man Who Exposed L.A.’s Notorious Sheriff Gangs. By Ethan Brown / New York Magazine
John Sweeney has built his career, as well as a sizable fortune, on exposing violent gangs that reside on the other side of the thin blue line — within the Los Angeles Sheriff’s Department. These “deputy gangs,” as they are known, have been accused of hunting down Black men and framing the victims as instigators. In 2020, the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors estimated that legal settlements related to deputy-gang misconduct have cost taxpayers $55 million. “I’m not saying this in a self-aggrandizing fashion,” Sweeney said in November, “but $30 million of that $55 million have been my verdicts and settlements against the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department just in the last seven or eight years.” Read more
Ethics / Morality / Religion
Online Forum with Pew Research on Black Religious Affiliation. By AAIHS Editors
Black Perspectives, the award-winning blog of the African American Intellectual History Society, is collaborating with the Pew Research Center to host an online forum on the theme of “Black religious affiliation.” Organized in consultation with Kelsey Beveridge of the Pew Research Center, this online forum will put into historical context recent data compiled by the Pew Research Center on Black religion and Black life in America. The online forum begins on Thursday, February 10, and concludes on Thursday, February 17. The forum will include essays from Sherman Jackson, Kijan Bloomfield, Jemar Tisby, Vaughn Booker, Nicole Myers Turner, and James Padilioni. Read more
Christena Cleveland shifts from ‘white male God’ to ‘Sacred Black Feminine.’ By Adelle M. Banks / RNS
The author of ‘God Is a Black Woman’ said she’s a theist but ‘my understanding of God is not what most people would say is orthodox Christianity.’
Christena Cleveland refuses to be placed in a box. Having built a career as a social psychologist and public theologian on the faculty of Duke Divinity School and with a busy speaking schedule, in 2019, Cleveland left her position and her talks on racial reconciliation behind to found the Center for Justice + Renewal to “stimulate people’s spiritual imaginations” through social activism. Read more
Kentucky archdiocese to be led by bishop who’s fought racism. By AP and RNS
Fabre, who is Black, serves as the chair of the USCCB’s Ad Hoc Committee Against Racism and led the writing of the U.S. bishops’ most recent pastoral letter on racism.
A Louisiana bishop who has led efforts against racism was named on Tuesday as the archbishop for the Archdiocese of Louisville in Kentucky. The Most Reverend Shelton J. Fabre has served as bishop of the Diocese of Houma-Thibodaux since 2013. His appointment was announced by Pope Francis. Fabre, who is Black, serves as the chair of the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops’ Ad Hoc Committee Against Racism and led the writing of the U.S. Bishops’ most recent pastoral letter on racism, a statement from the Archdiocese of Louisville said. Read more
How 18th-century Quakers led a boycott of sugar to protest against slavery. By Julie L. Holcomb / RNS
Eighteenth-century Quakers attempted to align their religious beliefs with what they purchased. These Quakers led some of the early campaigns against sugar being produced by enslaved people.
Buying items that are fair trade, organic, locally made or cruelty-free are some of the ways in which consumers today seek to align their economic habits with their spiritual and ethical views. For 18th-century Quakers, it led them to abstain from sugar and other goods produced by enslaved people. Read more
“Blacks and Jews” authors: “Whoopi is not the enemy” but “it may be too late” for America anyway. By Alison Stine / Salon
Salon spoke to Terrence L. Johnson and Jacques Berlinerblau about race, “Maus” and where we should go from here
Terrence L. Johnson is a professor of religion and politics at Georgetown University. Jacques Berlinerblau is a professor of Jewish civilization at Georgetown University. Together, they are co-authors of “Blacks and Jews in America: An Invitation to Dialogue” (Georgetown University Press, out this week) and frequent contributors to Salon. Read more
Related: Biden’s pick to combat antisemitism finally gets hearing. By Kevin Freking / RNS
Historical / Cultural
Paul Robeson–The Revolutionary. By Tony Pecinovsky / AAIHS
LIVING TIMELINE: PAUL ROBESON Mural by Art Bloc DC on the exterior wall of 1351 U Street, NW, Washington DC, June 21, 2015, captured by Elvert Barnes Photography (Flickr)
It was reported in his New York Times obituary that Paul Robeson became a “virtual recluse” by the time of his death on January 23, 1976. He was living in his sister’s home in a working-class neighborhood in Philadelphia, completely retired from public life. From a pinnacle of roughly $100,000 per year in the early-1940s, Robeson’s income had dwindled by the mid-1950s to a few thousand dollars, largely a consequence of his U.S. passport being revoked. Though his finances rebounded some by the 1960s, Robeson never regained the domestic celebrity status he once enjoyed. Read more
This year, Black History Month is all about the here and now. By Eddie Glaude Jr. / Wash Post
This year’s celebration of Black History Month is weighed down by the ugliness of our politics and by the pitched battles over our past. Americans remain bitterly divided as the former president and his loyalists exploit deep-seated fears and hatreds. The problems of race sit at the heart of it all: We’re fighting, yet again, over voting rights and clashing over the stories we tell about who we are as a nation. A slight revision of Mark Twain’s famous quip might be in order: History both repeats and rhymes. Read more
It’s Time To Shed Light On Black Americans’ Contributions To The Coffee Industry. By Garin Pirnia / HuffPost
[In 2018], I wrote an article about the lack of Black Americans in coffee, and one of the reviewers said there was no reason for me to write about such a topic. There was a lot of pushback about that article and a lot of pushback on how much of a contribution Black people had made to coffee, because there had never been an examination of that. When it was talked about it would be, well, enslavement was an issue. Coffee was part of colonization and enslavement, and it’s kind of left there. But because you don’t have representation in telling these stories, the stories don’t exist for any other contributors to coffee other than white people. Read more
ABC’s ‘Abbott Elementary’ and the mockumentary genre are a match made in TV heaven. By
ABC’s new hit show “Abbott Elementary” sends Twitter abuzz every week as fans rush to express their gratitude for the way it highlights issues in education, gives viewers plenty of laughs and guarantees a touching moment or two along the way. It seems the series has yet to be canceled or renewed for a second season. However, given the splash it’s made in popular culture, a second season seems like too good of a chance to miss. Read more
New CW show ‘March’ gives the world an authentic look into the HBCU band culture at Prairie View A&M. By Tucker Toole / The Undefeated
The eight-episode series highlights camaraderie, hard work and real-life drama.
A historically Black college and university (HBCU) band cannot be compared with any other. From the rhythms of the early-morning practices to the loud cheers from the stands on Saturdays, HBCU bands are the soul of their institutions. Their impact goes beyond their members. The new CW reality series March gives the world an inside look at the day-to-day of an HBCU band made up of more than 300 people. The show airs on Mondays at 8 p.m. ET and features the PVAMU Marching Storm, the Prairie View A&M University marching band. Told through the lens of students, the band director and dance leader, viewers will see how these young adults balance class, studying and social life while maintaining their band duties. Read more
Sports
Study suggests new evidence of discrimination against Black coaches in the NFL since 2018. By Joshua Pitts / The Conversation
We collected data on all 267 NFL coordinators between 2003 and 2020. In addition to race, our model accounts for a coordinator’s age; their years of experience as a coordinator; their years of NFL playing experience; what position they played in college; what positions they coached in the NFL; whether they had NFL or college head-coaching experience; whether they were an offensive or defensive coordinator; whether they were coaching under an offensive- or defensive-minded head coach; and their performance as a coordinator. The model also controls for the number of head-coaching vacancies each offseason. Read more
Texans make Lovie Smith the first Black head coach hired this NFL offseason. By Mark Maske / Wash Post
The Houston Texans, after a late change of direction in their search, opted to promote from within and hired Lovie Smith as their head coach Monday. Smith, 63, gets his third opportunity to be an NFL head coach. He became the only Black head coach hired this offseason as NFL teams completed the work Monday of filling nine vacancies. Read more
Mike McDaniel, new Dolphins coach, doesn’t owe anyone an explanation. By Mike Freeman / USA Today
The McDaniel hire, and subsequent conversations, focused on a central question: what is Black? As for my girl, she is a dream of a daughter: smart, funny, and a stunningly good athlete. My daughter, like McDaniel, is biracial, and she looks white. With straight, blondish hair and blue eyes. Her looks, combined with my dark Black skin, have led to some staggeringly racist moments when we’re in public, since apparently people don’t know how genetics work. Once, a white woman thought I was her babysitter. Another thought I was her driver. “Are you her chauffer?” she asked. Read more
Eric Dickerson’s injuries are grim reminder of NFL’s bodily toll. By Jarett Bell / USA Today
During his heyday, Eric Dickerson was one of the NFL’s most lethal running backs, a mass of speed, power, grace, guile, grit and tremendous production. He looked cool, too, capable of going the distance on any given snap as he peered from his Rec Specs, padded up with a neck collar while rocking a Jheri curl. Now the owner of the NFL’s single-season rushing record just wants to get a good night’s sleep. It’s the pain. In the neck. Or back. Or head. Or shoulder. Or toe. Or any combination thereof. Read more
Super Bowl: NFL, Jay-Z have failed to amplify social justice efforts. By Mike Freeman / USA Today
It was August of 2019 when the NFL announced what seemed to be a remarkable piece of news: the league was entering a multi-year agreement with Roc Nation, started by Jay-Z. This happened in the aftermath of the Colin Kaepernick protest movement. The NFL not only didn’t back Kaepernick, it banished him. The belief some had was that Jay-Z could bridge the gap between Kaepernick and NFL owners. It was a ridiculous belief but there was hope. The NFL and Jay-Z were definitely giving the impression that his role wasn’t superficial; it was substantive. It was also, it turns out, totally false. Read more
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