Featured
Bosnia, Ukraine and the dangers of ethnic nationalism. By Tom Mockaitis / The Hill
Thirty years ago the tiny country of Bosnia-Herzegovina exploded into a civil war that took the lives of more than 97,000 people and included the worst genocide in Europe since WWII. With ethnic nationalism once again rearing its ugly head in Russia and so many places around the world, the conflict serves as a grim reminder of where that ideology leads.
Frightened people are attracted to identity politics, and we live in frightening times. Climate change, economic distress, forced migration and especially COVID encourage people to draw close to their own group and blame others for their problems. There is no shortage of politicians willing to exploit this herd mentality. Ethnic populism may work in the short run, but it always comes at a terrible price, which is why we must oppose it wherever it appears. Read more
Related: Putin’s Most Useful Idiot. Charlie Sykes / The Bulwark
Related: Ukraine Isn’t the Only Target of Putin’s Aggression. By Ian Kelly and David J. Kramer / The Bulwark
Political / Social
The Long Crusade of Clarence and Ginni Thomas. Danny Hakim and
The Supreme Court justice and his wife battled for years for a more conservative America. New reporting shows how far she was willing to go after Donald Trump’s 2020 election loss.
The call to action was titled “Election Results and Legal Battles: What Now?” Shared in the days after the 2020 presidential election, it urged the members of an influential if secretive right-wing group to contact legislators in three of the swing states that tipped the balance for Joe Biden — Arizona, Georgia and Pennsylvania. The aim was audacious: Keep President Donald J. Trump in power. Such a plan, if carried out successfully, would have almost certainly landed before the Supreme Court — and Ginni Thomas’s husband. Read more
Related: Ketanji Brown Jackson’s candid 2007 take on Justice Clarence Thomas: ‘I don’t understand you.’
Black voters are being written out of US democracy. By David Daley / CNN
Earlier this month, just hours after the US Supreme Court restored a congressional map that a lower federal court had ordered redrawn because it diluted Black voting power, I set out to drive many of these district lines that surgically divide Alabama by race. What I found was startling but not surprising: These lines neatly trace, and perpetuate, Alabama’s history of racial injustice, dividing — for example — the Montgomery of Rosa Parks from the city’s tony, country club enclaves. Read more
Biden interviews three Black women as potential supreme court picks. By Maya Yang / The Guardian
Joe Biden has interviewed at least three potential supreme court nominees and is expected to reveal his decision by the end of this month, according to multiple sources close to the president. Ketanji Brown Jackson (shown), Leondra Kruger and J. Michelle Childs – all Black women – were among the contenders who spoke with the president, those familiar with the matter told CNN and the Washington Post. Jackson, who has widely been considered the frontrunner, currently sits on the US court of appeals for the DC circuit after replacing the attorney general, Merrick Garland, in June 2021. Read more
Black educators reflect on teaching history amid critical race theory backlash. Kiara Alfonseca / GMA
Recent attacks on race education, via the targeting of “critical race theory” in schools, have put Black educators — and the lessons they teach on racial inequality — under scrutiny. For Black educators across the country, Black History Month offers a chance to focus and deeply explore the role of Black Americans in the making of the United States as we know it. The racism that Black people in America have experienced for centuries is inseparable from that history, educators say, and to ignore it is to ignore the truths of their own community and livelihoods. Read more
White men as victims: America’s most dangerous fantasy. By Chauncey Devega / Salon
The notion that white men are a persecuted minority isn’t just ludicrous — it paves the way for racist violence.
One of the most popular lies being circulated by the Republican Party and the larger white right is that white men are somehow oppressed in America. To say that such a claim is absurd would be an understatement. To be white is to have access to unearned advantages in almost every arena of American society and throughout the world. And to be male is also to have access to resources and life opportunities that in general are de facto still denied to women and girls. By almost all indicators, men as a group dominate and control America’s networks of power, influence, wealth and other resources. Read more
Ahmaud Arbery: What historic hate crime verdict means for US justice. By Grace Hauck / USA Today
“The first trial was whitewashed. It took race out of the situation, and that was a real harm,” said Justin Hansford, executive director of the Thurgood Marshall Civil Rights Center at Howard University. “It meant a lot to have this second verdict that expressed a particular acknowledgment of the fact that this was a hate crime and punishing it as such.” Tuesday, a jury Tuesday found father and son Gregory and Travis McMichael and their neighbor William “Roddie” Bryan guilty of hate crimes and attempted kidnapping in the murder of Ahmaud Arbery on Feb. 23, 2020. The three men are already serving life in prison on state convictions, and they face an additional life sentence. The outcome marks a historic moment in Georgia. Experts said the case indicates the Justice Department’s increasingly active role in prosecuting crimes motivated by hate. Read more
Related: Georgia marks statewide ‘Ahmaud Arbery Day’ to honor the slain jogger. By Joe Hernandez / NPR
Ben Crump on Fighting for Justice for Daunte Wright, Ahmaud Arbery, Trayvon Martin & Z’Kye Husain. By Amy Goodman / Democracy Now
We speak to Benjamin Crump, attorney for the Wright family, about Judge Regina Chu’s sympathy expressed for Potter during closing statements and how white criminals tend to receive lighter sentences. “Police officers, when it comes to Black people, they always do the most,” says Crump. Crump also weighs in on other clients he currently represents, such as the family of Ahmaud Arbery, the unarmed Black jogger who was fatally shot in Georgia, and Z’Kye Husain, a Black teen who was racially profiled and violently arrested by police in a New Jersey mall. Watch here
Related: Prosecutor in George Floyd civil rights trial: Officers ‘chose to do nothing. AP and NPR
Related: Trayvon Martin’s death: His mother talks grief regret 10 years later. By Suzette Hackney / USA Today
We All Deserve to Be Safe. By Nicole Chung / The Atlantic
How do I talk to my teenage daughter about violence against Asian women?
A few nights ago I dreamed that you were leaving home, heading out into the world on your own, and I was panicking because I hadn’t yet warned you about those who might try to harm you. Of course, we have talked many times about being a woman, an Asian woman, in this country and in the world. We have talked about the racial and gender-based violence that so many girls and women and people of color experience. These and other difficult but needful conversations have been ongoing for years, deepening over time, growing as you have; sometimes, you are the one who starts them. In my dream, though, all I felt was the unshakeable fear that, as your mother, I had not done or said enough. Read more
It’s Time to Take Woke Capital Seriously. By Steve Fraser / Dissent
The left tends to dismiss corporate pandering to identity politics as insincere and inconsequential. It does so at its peril.
Corporate America appears newly awakened to the cause of social justice. Major companies have mobilized in defense of electoral democracy and express support for racial equality and the rights of women and sexual minorities. Some businesses not only fill the airwaves with clever commercials and editorial statements about these issues but also put their money where their mouths are. As early as 2015, corporate opposition forced Republicans in Indiana and North Carolina to back off anti-gay and anti-transgender legislation. More recently, Coca-Cola and Delta have criticized voter-suppression laws and have been punished for their troubles. Read more
Biden admin’s goal to correct racial divide in infrastructure hits speed bumps. By , and
Pregnancy-Related Deaths Increased During Pandemic, Disproportionately Affects Black People, According to Report. By Noah A. McGee / The Root
During the first year of the coronavirus pandemic in 2020, pregnancy-related deaths for mothers in the United States increased and they disproportionately affected Black people, according to the Associated Press. In 2020 alone, there were 24 deaths per 100,000 births, which equaled 861 deaths total for the year. In 2019, the rate was 20 deaths per 100,000 births. For Black people, the rate was 55 deaths per 100,000 births, triple the rate compared to white people. Read more
Native American Tribe Declares Emergency Over Missing And Murdered Women. By Gilllian Flaccus / HuffPost
The recent disappearance of young mother Emmilee Risling has spotlighted an epidemic that has long disproportionately plagued Native Americans.
Her disappearance is one of five instances in the past 18 months where Indigenous women have gone missing or been killed in this isolated expanse of Pacific coastline between San Francisco and Oregon, a region where the Yurok, Hupa, Karuk, Tolowa and Wiyot people have coexisted for millennia. Two other women died from what authorities say were overdoses despite relatives’ questions about severe bruises. The crisis has spurred the Yurok Tribe to issue an emergency declaration and brought increased urgency to efforts to build California’s first database of such cases and regain sovereignty over key services. Read more
Ethics / Morality / Religion
Music, journalism, slang, swagger — the Black prophetic tradition is all around us. By Byron Wratee / NCR
Mischa, 6, from Maryland, holds a bullhorn in front of a “Black Lives Matter” protest sign near the White House in Washington June 10, 2020.
Black Christians know deep in their hearts that God cares immensely about Black children, women and men who suffer under the enduring legacy of chattel slavery and U.S. apartheid and continue to struggle under worldwide systemic racism and white supremacy. The pathos of God for Black lives is the wellspring for the Black prophetic tradition in the U.S. The Black prophetic tradition began on the shores of West Africa, where tribes and villages attempted to resist captivity. It found its spiritual vitality during the Middle Passage when “the Spirit interceded with sighs too deep for words” in the hearts of African women, children and men chained in the belly of slave ships (Romans 8:26). Read more
Ethics in Designing Prisons. By David Tereshuchuk / Religion and Ethics
Imagine you’re an architect. Your assignment? To design a prison. Heaven knows, you’re needed. The boom in American prison-construction – an almost four-fold growth from 500 to nearly 2000 facilities since the 1970s – has become a (disturbing) wonder of the western world. You would face challenging ethical questions as a practicing professional. Like … would you, as part of your assignment, be willing to design an execution-chamber? Perhaps not. Well, that’s maybe not so much of a problem. The building of a brand-new execution-chamber, after all, is a rare event. But let’s pose another, maybe less extreme case. How would you feel about designing solitary confinement units? There’s much greater call for these, since just about every new prison in America calls for some space devoted to “isolation”, “administrative segregation”, “behavior intervention” – or whatever voguish euphemism may be currently in use by whichever prison authority is commissioning the building. Read more
From new Christian right to Christian nationalism, part 2. By Mark Silk / Religion News
In the early 2000s, white evangelicals became solidly locked into the Republican Party, and they have voted for GOP presidential and congressional candidates by 4-1 margins ever since. In 2002, Reed gave an object lesson in faith-based mobilization as chairman of the Georgia Republican Party when he flipped the state from Democratic to Republican control. It would be more accurate to call this merging of identities Christian Americanism — the political religion of the Trumpist GOP. No single piece of iconography better conveys this religion than “One Nation Under God,” the painting by Jon McNaughton reproduced at the top of this column. Based on medieval portrayals of the Last Judgment, it shows Jesus holding the U.S. Constitution, flanked by the country’s saints, with the saved (pious citizens) at the lower left and the damned (journalists, professors, feminists) at the lower right. Read more
Historical / Cultural
State v. Mann: Lydia’s Journey. By Sally Greene / AAIHS
Naturally, we don’t know her full name. That we know her at all is only because of a gun aimed at her by a man who aimed to control her. The shot John Mann fired at the fleeing Lydia, in Edenton in 1829, was not heard ’round the world, at least not immediately. Among all the acts of violence great and small routinely inflicted on enslaved people, this one might never have been remembered. But John Mann was called to account in criminal court. And so the repercussions of his deed spiraled, at first locally when a jury found him guilty of assault, then broadly when the North Carolina Supreme Court reversed the conviction and absolved him of responsibility. In upholding the right of John Mann to punish the disobedient Lydia with gunfire, Judge Thomas Ruffin (shown) wrote in State v. Mann (1829), “the power of the master must be absolute, to render the submission of the slave perfect.” Read more
A Black historian journeys south to confront the past – and present. By Andrea Collier / CS Monitor
The American South has never fit neatly into the framework of the United States, even before enslaved Africans were brought to the nation’s shores. But to understand America, and especially the topic of race, requires looking at the Southern states, writes Imani Perry in “South to America: A Journey Below the Mason-Dixon to Understand the Soul of a Nation.” Perry, who was born in Birmingham, Alabama, in 1972, is a professor of American studies at Princeton University. In this highly personal travelogue, she brings readers along to absorb her observations and internal dialogue. Read more
In 1939, Nazis packed Madison Square Garden to celebrate George Washington’s birthday. By Charles Jay / Daily Kos
Thousands of German-Americans sympathize with Nazi Germany by raising their hands in a Nazi salute as the German American Bund marches by. The Bund marched with the German Swastika flag and American flag during an annual “German Day” celebration at Camp Siegfried in Yaphank on Aug. 29, 1937 in Long Island, New York.
It can happen here. It did happen here. On Feb. 20, 1939, more than 20,000 Nazis packed Madison Square Garden for what was billed as a “pro-American” rally to celebrate George Washington’s birthday. The rally took place just seven months before Germany invaded Poland on Sept. 1, 1939, launching the bloodiest war in history. Read more
Tuskegee’s Civilizing Mission. By Kenneth Smith / AAIHS
The Hampton-Tuskegee model’s purpose was to build connections between two peoples who shared a common struggle of exploitation and subjugation to bring about racial uplift using skills they already were familiar with. Booker T. Washington supported a gradualist approach to civil rights because he was perceptive to the political and racial landscape of the time and knew that the accumulation of capital and showing whites that Black people shared the same goals as them was an important step to dismantling the barriers of discrimination. Read more
Charleston wharf to become International African American Museum. By Christine Fernando / USA Today
Centuries ago, an estimated 100,000 enslaved Africans were taken to America by way of Gadsden’s Wharf in Charleston, South Carolina. Enslaved people were shackled and corralled like cattle, hustled off ships and into the wharf’s storehouses before they were sold. Ten years ago, archeologists discovered the wooden remnants of the 18th-century wharf in the city’s downtown area, within miles of its most popular tourist sites. By the end of this year, overlooking the same water on a site now considered sacred will be the long-awaited International African American Museum with a center for genealogy and a memorial garden leading up to the water’s edge. Read more
How Leaders Can Foster Inclusion During US Black History Month And Beyond. By Dennis Williams / Forbes
US Black History Month is critical to telling the stories that have been underrepresented in the history lessons of America. This month serves as a reminder that Black history is American history and helps ensure the American history we all learn is more complete. But beyond the historical aspect, there’s more to this month of celebration. It’s also a time to share insights that help break down biases and barriers to having inclusive and thriving teams today. And it’s a reminder of our obligation to keep making progress on diversity and inclusion. Read more
Related: Black history comes alive with drama and heroism — in Trump Country. By Gary Abernathy / Wash Post
Related: How the banned books panic fits America’s history of school censorship. By Constance Grady / Vox
Sports
The Meaning Behind Brian Flores’s New Job. By Dave Zirin / The Nation
Brian Flores has a new gig in the league, but it won’t deter him from pressing forward on his racial discrimination suit.
Brian Flores is once again coaching in the National Football League. Yes, in a position he is overqualified for: defensive assistant in charge of linebackers. I don’t think either the Rooney family or Roger Goodell’s NFL thought that this hiring would deter Flores from pursuing his case—or they are about as naive as people who thought that Aaron Rodgers would galvanize the players around him and lead the Packers to the Super Bowl. Read more
Deion Sanders kicked down doors but where do HBCU sports go now? By Dan Wolken / USA Today
Kortne Gosha’s reaction mirrored the rest of college sports when Ashley Robinson, the athletics director at Jackson State, revealed in September 2020 that he was about to hire Deion Sanders as head football coach. “He called me and said, ‘What do you think?’ ” said Gosha, the athletics director at Florida A&M and Robinson’s longtime friend. “I said, ‘You’ll win the press conference.’ ” At best, hiring an NFL Hall of Famer and media star with a short coaching track record looked like a high-risk, high-reward bet on the force of Sanders’ personality bringing national interest to a program that had fallen into irrelevance. At worst, it could have been a publicity stunt doomed to embarrass everyone involved. Read more
All-Black American expedition aims to be first to summit Mount Everest. By Felecia Wellington Rade / USA Today
It often comes down to one small step in front of the other for the hundreds of people who attempt each year to summit Mount Everest. The Full Circle Everest team is following in the footsteps of the mountaineers that came before, aiming to be the first all-Black American expedition to make it to the top of world’s highest mountain. The team will be making their ascent on the south side of the mountain with a summit push likely later this spring, but their journey has already begun. Read more
‘Another Act’: Bubba Wallace gets personal in Netflix docuseries ‘Race.’ By Kelley Carter / The Undefeated
The NASCAR driver wants to be remembered for more than the noose incident. The professional stock racer, 27, whose real name is Darrell Wallace Jr., rose to prominence during the 2020 season after successfully campaigning to have the Confederate flag banned from all NASCAR events. “No one should feel uncomfortable when they come to a NASCAR race,” he told CNN in June 2020 after unveiling a Black Lives Matter paint scheme on his car. “It starts with Confederate flags. Get them out of here. They have no place for them.” Watch here
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