Featured
The 150-Year Prosecution of White Supremacy. By Melissa Gira Grant / The New Republic
If Merrick Garland is confirmed by the Senate and becomes the next attorney general, his first priority, according to the testimony he offered on Monday, would be supervising “the prosecution of white supremacists and others who stormed the Capitol on January 6.” In both his prepared remarks and his answers to senators’ questions, Garland framed the siege as an attack on American democracy itself, and the job of the Department of Justice as “battling extremist attacks on our democratic institutions.” Read more
Related: Republicans Need ‘To Make Clear We Aren’t The Party Of White Supremacy.’ By Lee Moran / HuffPost
Political / Social
Clarence Thomas promotes Donald Trump’s big lie about voter fraud. By Mark Joseph Stern / Slate
Justice Clarence Thomas is not backing down from the fight to legitimize Donald Trump’s claims that the 2020 election was rife with fraud. On Monday morning, Thomas issued a startling opinion ranting against the alleged dangers of mail voting and declaring that SCOTUS must override state courts that expand vote by mail pursuant to their state constitutions. Trump may be out of office, but his staunchest ally on the U.S. Supreme Court is carrying on his assault on the legitimacy of the election. Read more
Related: Republicans Are Taking Their Voter Suppression Efforts to New Extremes. By Ari Berman / Mother Jones
Evangelical Leaders Raise Alarms About Christian Nationalism In Their Ranks. By Sarah McCammon / NPR
A coalition of evangelical Christian leaders is condemning the role of “radicalized Christian nationalism” in feeding the political extremism that led to the violent insurrection at the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6 by supporters of former President Donald Trump. In an open letter, more than 100 pastors, ministry and seminary leaders, and other prominent evangelicals express concern about the growing “radicalization” they’re seeing, particularly among white evangelicals. Read more
Related: Evangelical leaders launch nationwide push against extremism. By John Bowden / The Hill
500,000 Americans have died of Covid. Will we wake up to our own callousness? By Reverend William Barber / The Guardian
As the United States marks the terrible milestone of half a million souls lost to Covid-19, these deaths demand a grown-up conversation about the policies that shape our public life. When we look at the impact of this pandemic on other wealthy nations around the world, the disproportionate death toll we have sustained in the US exposes a basic failure of national security. Though we spend more than the next several nations combined on our military budget, our government was unable to protect its citizens against a deadly pathogen. Read more
Related: The GOP’s Ayn Rand death cult: Trump’s party is literally killing the American people. By Chauncey Devega / Salon
It Was Garland’s Hearing—but Women of Color Were on Trial. By Elie Mystal / The Nation
Republicans on the Senate Judiciary Committee, even members of the Sedition Caucus, didn’t have anything they could use to poke holes in Garland’s flawless résumé or anodyne public profile. So instead, they directed their attacks at the two women of color Biden has nominated to join Garland at the Justice Department: Vanita Gupta (nominated as associate attorney general) and Kristen Clarke (nominated to head the Civil Rights Division). Read more
Related: Joe Biden’s Nominees Of Color Are Facing Outsize Opposition. By Emily Peck / HuffPost
‘She became an easy target’: GOP opposition to Haaland rankles Native Americans. By Anthony Adragna and Ben Lefebvre / Politico
Republican senators opposed to Rep. Deb Haaland’s nomination to be President Joe Biden’s leader of the Interior Department are centering their resistance on what they call the New Mexico Democrat’s “extreme views” on fossil fuels and use of federal lands. But supporters of Haaland, who would be the nation’s first Native American to serve in a presidential Cabinet, say they see a familiar pattern in the Republicans’ rhetoric and their unusual move to voice their opposition even before her nomination hearing was scheduled. They say she’s facing a level of criticism above and beyond the normal fiery Washington political rhetoric. Read more
Related: Why Indigenous people in cities feel ‘invisible’ as pandemic wears on. By Casey Kuhn / PBS
People Over 75 Are First in Line to Be Vaccinated Against COVID-19. The Average Black Person Here Doesn’t Live That Long. By Wendi C. Thomas and Hannah Grabenstein / ProPublica
Prioritizing by age might seem like an obvious choice, given the disproportionate impact of the disease on the elderly. Setting the initial threshold at 75, however, ignores the fact that a smaller share of Black people reach that age than white people. It also fails to account for research, released by the nonprofit Brookings Institution in June, showing that Black people who die of COVID-19 are, on average, about 10 years younger than white victims of the disease. Read more
Anti-Asian violence is surging. But we can’t answer bigotry with bigotry. By Andrew Wang / Wash Post
Beneath calls for advocacy and safety, some conversations circulating within Asian American communities are troubling. Across online platforms, video footage showing Black men as the perpetrators in some attacks has spawned greater anti-Black sentiment even as nationwide protests in defense of Black lives continue. I urge my fellow Asian Americans to reject these narratives. We cannot answer racism with racism. Read more
Lawsuit calls out alleged co-conspirators in Arbery murder. Chief among them: Georgia cops. By Lauren Floyd / Daily Kos
Exactly one year after her son’s death, Ahmaud Arbery’s mother filed a lawsuit in federal court on Tuesday seeking to hold not only the men accused of killing Arbery accountable but the prosecutors and police department that allowed the accused killers to go free for 74 days after Arbery’s death. Wander Cooper-Jones is seeking in excess of $1 million in U.S. District Court, according to the lawsuit. Read more
Why state legislatures are still very white — and very male. By Renuka Rayasam, Nolan D McCaskill, Beatrice Jin and Allan James Vestal / Politico
Even as the share of nonwhite Americans has grown, a POLITICO analysis of data from the National Conference of State Legislatures finds that most state legislatures are lacking in diversity, with nearly every state failing to achieve racial and gender parity with their own population data. Despite efforts to diversify politics, progress in statehouses remains slow and halting. That’s in contrast to the U.S. House of Representatives, where historically underrepresented groups, including women and people of color, are serving in record numbers. Read more
For Black Families, Evictions Are Still At A Crisis Point — Despite Moratorium. By Pam Fessler / NPR
It’s a simple fact. Black and brown families are more likely to be evicted than white ones. There are many reasons for this, but the pandemic has made matters worse and could widen the gap for years to come. Aniya is a case in point. She’s a mother of two, unemployed, struggling to get by. By the end of this month, she has to leave her two-bedroom apartment in Richmond, VA., and find a new place to live. This comes on top of an already tough 2020. We agreed not to use Aniya’s full name because of possible repercussions on her ability to find another place to live. Read more
Virginia Senate votes to make racism a public health crisis. What now? By Bill Atkinson / The Progress-Index
Virginia, a state long associated with racist and segregationist behavior, is now only a signature away from becoming the first state in the South to declare racism a public-health crisis. Tuesday, the state Senate on a voice vote approved the declaration and sent it on to the desk of Gov. Ralph S. Northam, who is expected to sign it. Read more
Latinos need to confront their own racism, say Afro-Latinos pushing for racial equity. By Nicole Acevedo / NBC News
Part of Latinos’ racial reckoning is shedding the idea that “blackness is something else that is U.S.-based” and “doesn’t directly affect our Afro-Latino brothers and sisters,” said Fordham University law professor Tanya Hernandez, author of the coming book “On Latino Anti-Black Bias: ‘Racial Innocence’ & The Struggle for Equality. “Latinos “need to stop acting as if our ethnicity shields us from any implications in regard to racial issues,” Hernandez said. “An ethnic group is not impervious to issues of racism simply because they, too, are victims of racialization.” Read more
What I learned when I recreated the famous ‘doll test’ that looked at how Black kids see race. By Toni Sturdivant / The Conversation
Back in the 1940s, Kenneth and Mamie Clark – a husband-and-wife team of psychology researchers – used dolls to investigate how young Black children viewed their racial identities. They found that given a choice between Black dolls and white dolls, most Black children preferred to play with white dolls. Without asking specific questions as the Clarks did, I still found a great deal of bias in how the girls treated the dolls. The girls rarely chose the Black dolls during play. On the rare occasions that the girls chose the Black dolls, they mistreated them. Read more
Related: Why Aren’t There More Black Teachers? By Rann Miller / The Progressive
Historical / Cultural
New York City and the Persistence of the Atlantic Slave Trade. By Gerald Horne / The Nation
John Harris’s The Last Slave Ships offers a more comprehensive portrait of the illegal slave trade in the Atlantic, starting with the last slave ships to dock in New York Harbor. Mining the historical archives in Spain, Portugal, Cuba, and the United States, Harris demonstrates how, even as slavery was being abolished in the Northern states, it continued to flourish, since the slave system was not confined simply to below the Mason-Dixon Line. The financing of the slave trade’s illegitimate commerce was sited heavily in Manhattan: Read more
She sued her enslaver for reparations and won. Her descendants never knew. By Sydney Trent / Wash Post
Years would pass before David would learn about the indomitable woman who would turn out to be his great-great-grandmother. After the Civil War, Henrietta Wood sued for reparations for her enslavement, becoming the recipient of the largest known sum paid out in restitution for slavery by the U.S. courts. Her case has fresh resonance in 2021, as Congress debates forming a commission to examine the nation’s support for slavery, and the brutal racial oppression that followed, and propose reparations for its enduring consequences. Read more
Historic number of Confederate statues were removed in 2020. By N’dea Yancey-Bragg / USA Today
More than 90 Confederate monuments were taken down or moved from public spaces in 2020 following the death of George Floyd, according to new data from the Southern Poverty Law Center. The latest data documents nearly 800 Confederate monuments that were in the U.S. at the beginning of that year, a number that dwindled to about 700 by the end of it. Read more
Black Americans Have Long Led the Global Battle Against White Supremacy. By Benjamin Talton / AAIHS
African American activists’ steadfast opposition to authoritarianism and white supremacy at home and abroad offer lessons for the U.S. government. During World War II, activists created the Double V (Double Victory) Campaign against domestic and foreign tyranny. Even as their own country treated them as internal threats, African Americans, from Paul and Eslanda Goode Robeson, W.E.B. and Shirley Graham Du Bois and Mary McCleod Bethune to Martin Luther King Jr, among many others, took sustained and principled stances against authoritarianism and imperialism. Read more
Related: America needs us to get outside our comfort zones. By James Clyburn / CNN
What “Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents” Leaves Out. By Hari Ramesh / Dissent
Debates around the histories of caste in South Asia and race in the United States have largely faded from view. In Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents, the journalist Isabel Wilkerson attempts to change this. She argues that Americans must “recalibrate how we see ourselves” by understanding U.S. racial inequality as a caste system, and opposing it on these terms. Adopting caste as a transnational historical category generates some important insights, but pressing it too far risks confusing different political circumstances. When we conceptualize and resist racial subjugation first and foremost because it is a caste system, we risk losing vital, context-born insights that might aid and energize our political endeavors. Read more
Magical Negroes can’t exist without a Mister Charlie or Miss Ann. By Soraya Nadia McDonald / The Undefeated
Why do I bring this up? Because in the fun house mirror that displays Magical Negroes, there is always a hapless Mister Charlie or a helpless Miss Ann standing next to them. Magical Negroes cannot exist without a clueless white person — sometimes an entire family of them! — who requires their aid, which of course is offered for free, or close to it. (Art that’s got a Magical Negro and no white people in it is minstrelsy.) While trying to come up with names for these types of white characters, I figured they needed to be as retrograde as “Negro,” hence “Mister Charlie” and “Miss Ann,” as opposed to the more contemporary “Chad” and “Karen.” Read more
The world of the Black Panthers Photos. By Stephen Shames / ABC News
Published on the 50th anniversary of the party’s founding, “Power to the People: The World of the Black Panthers,” by Stephen Shames, who is one of America’s leading photographers dealing with social issues. Admired, reviled, emulated and misunderstood, the Black Panther Party was one of the most creative and influential responses to racism and economic inequality in American history. Here, Panthers line up at a “Free Huey” rally in DeFremery Park, in west Oakland’s ghetto, July 28, 1968, in Oakland, California. View here
Remembering Octavia Butler: Black Sci-Fi Writer Shares Cautionary Tales in Unearthed 2005 Interview. By Amy Goodman / Democracy Now
She spoke to Democracy Now! in November 2005, just three months before she died on February 24, 2006, at age 58. Butler was the first Black woman to win Hugo and Nebula awards for science-fiction writing and the first science-fiction writer to receive a MacArthur “genius” fellowship. Her best-known books include the classics “Kindred,” as well as “Parable of the Sower” and “Parable of the Talents” — two-thirds of a trilogy that was never finished. Her work inspired a new generation of Black science-fiction writers, and she has been called “the Mother of Afrofuturism.” View here
Black Americans left a lasting mark on Paris. Modern creatives are walking in their footsteps today. By Priscilla Lalisse-Jespersen / Wash Post
Black Americans have been migrating to Paris for decades, and the Roaring Twenties, les années folles (the crazy years), were especially significant. The French had just been introduced to jazz, and they fell in love with Black art and culture. Performers Josephine Baker and Sidney Bechet would leave their mark on music. More than two decades later, James Baldwin and Richard Wright would leave their mark on literature. All of them found a home in Paris, seeking to escape the daily trauma that Black people faced in the United States. Fast forward to today, and African American creatives are still migrating to Paris, while others are finding ways to keep Black history alive in the city. Read more
Sports
The boxing film that was banned around the world. By Coleman Lowdes / Vox
On December 26, 1908, American boxer Jack Johnson became the first Black heavyweight champion of the world, after defeating defending champion Tommy Burns in a title fight in Sydney, Australia. Black fighters were typically denied the chance to win the heavyweight title, a de facto line of segregation that was known as “the color line.” So when Burns accepted Johnson’s challenge and lost, the film of the fight proved controversial. View here
The white media missed the significance of Jackie Robinson. By Chris Lamb / The Undefeated
White sportswriters made no attempt to put the Robinson story in historical or sociological context. Sportswriters rarely interviewed Robinson. They relied for their quotes about Robinson on Rickey or one of his associates or one of the black or communist sportswriters who interviewed Robinson. In some cases, they simply made up their quotes. To white sportswriters, it was as if the issue wasn’t that Robinson had a different skin color; it was as if he spoke a different language. Read more
Muhammad Ali as You’ve Never Seen Him. By George Gene Gustines / NYT
Muhammad Ali, muscled, poised and with a punch ready to be thrown, is captured in a rarely seen photograph taken by Abbas Attar at the Rumble in the Jungle, one of the boxer’s most famous matches, in 1974. In the next moment, illustrated by Rafael Ortiz, Ali delivers the blow to George Foreman, and the panel seems to reverberate from its force. That powerful combination of photographs and comic book art is on display in a new graphic novel, “Muhammad Ali, Kinshasa 1974,” which retells the events of the legendary heavyweight title fight in Zaire, now the Democratic Republic of Congo. Read more
Tiger Woods Faces Tough Recovery From Leg Injuries Sustained In Car Crash. By Stephanie Dazio and Doug Ferguson / AP and HuffPostIn a career filled with remarkable comebacks, Tiger Woods faces his toughest recovery of all. Woods was driving through a sweeping, downhill stretch of road through coastal suburbs of Los Angeles when his SUV struck a sign, crossed over a raised median and two oncoming lanes before it toppled down an embankment, coming to a halt on its side. The airbags deployed. A sheriff’s deputy poked his head through a hole in the windshield to see Woods, still wearing his seatbelt, sitting in the driver’s seat. The crash caused “significant” injuries all down his right leg. Read more
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