Featured
By Dismantling Racist Myths, The 1619 Project Becomes Intensely Patriotic TV. By Stephen Robinson / Primetimer
Hulu’s docuseries turns the Pulitzer-winning journalism project into vital viewing. Shown is Nikole Hannah-Jones in The 1619 Project (Photo: Hulu)
Hulu’s The 1619 Project docuseries is must-see viewing, even for those who have already read the original, long-form journalism feature in The New York Times or engaged with the subsequent podcast and book. The series is more than just a straightforward adaptation of the Pulitzer Prize-winning project from writer Nikole Hannah-Jones. It’s not just a sequel, either. It’s a well-articulated, powerful response to what has become a sociopolitical maelstrom. That’s perfectly fitting, as it’s hard to imagine the recent Republican-led bans on race-conscious history in public schools without the white conservative backlash triggered by The 1619 Project’s publication in 2019 and the ensuing attention it received.
Hosted by Hannah-Jones, the docuseries explores “the legacy of slavery in modern-day America” over six episodes — “Democracy,” “Race,” “Music,” “Capitalism,” “Fear,” and “Justice” — that are adapted from essays that originally appeared in the paper. The first episodes of The 1619 Project premiere January 26 on Hulu.. Read more
Political / Social
What America’s Thinking- How Black Voters Cast Their Ballots In the 2022 Midterms: Analysis. By Rafael Bernal and Cheyanne M. Daniels / The Hill
Today on What America’s Thinking, Hill reporters Rafael Bernal and Cheyanne M. Daniels speak with CEO and founding partner of HITstrategies, Terrance Woodbury, about the historical voting trends of Black voters and how it compares to last year’s midterm election. Listen here
Related: The next test for Black and suburban Democrats is rapidly approaching. By David Byler / Wash Post
Related: This Is How Red States Silence Blue Cities. And Democracy. By Margaret Renkl / NYT
For Black voters, great expectations of America’s lone Black governor. By Ovetta Wiggins ,Erin Cox and Lateshia Beachum / Wash Post
It’s a point Wes Moore made dozens if not hundreds of times while asking for votes last year: He wasn’t running to make history.
An author, combat veteran and former nonprofit chief, Moore will be sworn in Wednesday on the steps of the Statehouse, just blocks away from Annapolis City Dock, one of the Chesapeake region’s earliest slave ports, and where the author Alex Haley’s Kunta Kinte, who was captured in Gambia in 1767, was sold into slavery. He becomes the first Black governor in Maryland, the third to be elected in the nation’s history and the only Black person to hold the office of governor in the United States today. Read more
What is Hillsdale College? Florida Gov. DeSantis wants to replicate it. By Nirvi Shah / USA Today
Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas speaks at Hillsdale College in 2016.
In many ways, Hillsdale College, in south-central Michigan, and New College of Florida, on the state’s Gulf Coast in Sarasota, could not be more different. The former is a private Christian college founded in 1844 that prides itself on not taking public dollars or allowing students to take government aid to attend, which allows it to forgo federal rules about disclosing its student demographics and adhering to Title IX guidance on sexual discrimination. Read more
Related: Ron DeSantis’s war on “wokeness” is a war against the First Amendment. By Ian Millhiser / Vox
A Georgia Republican Brags That Voter Suppression Helped Them in 2022. By Joan Walsh / The Nation
This is a perfect example of how even comparative GOP “moderates” are promoting the Big Lie—and have participated in deranging their own party and eroding American democracy. Shown is former Senator Kelly Loeffler.
Just last week, we learned that a Wisconsin Republican election commissioner boasted of the party’s success in dampening Black turnout, especially in Milwaukee, last November. Thanks to the state GOP’s “well thought out multi-faceted plan,” commissioner Robert Spindell e-mailed colleagues, 37,000 fewer voters cast ballots there than in 2018, “with the major reduction happening in the overwhelming Black and Hispanic areas.” It could have cost Democrat Mandela Barnes a Senate seat. Read more
Supreme Court justices are showing their willingness to boost conservative causes. By Joan Biskupic / CNN
Top row: Chief Justice John Roberts, Associate Justices Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito; bottom row: Associate Justices Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh and Amy Coney Barrett
Many of the cases the justices have accepted for the session, including the dispute over Trump-era limits on asylum claims, reflect long-held agenda items of justices on the right wing. This court, for example, seems determined to end policies that consider people’s race to address shortfalls in campus diversity or gaps in voting rights. Read more
Jackson, Mississippi’s water crisis persists as national attention and help fade away. By Char Adams / NBC News
Grassroots organizers who supported the city’s residents during the water crisis last summer say they’re now out of resources to help those in need.
In the months since the most recent water woes began in Jackson, Mississippi, national attention has died down, donations have dwindled, and volunteers have been hard to come by. Jackson’s already-frail water system suffered a dayslong outage over the summer, in a crisis that sparked national outrage and called attention to the decades of water struggles in the city of 150,000 residents, nearly 83% of them Black. Thanks to donations and the national attention, grassroots organizers were able to distribute hundreds of cases of bottled water to panicked residents after the O.B. Curtis Water Plant failed in August. Read more
San Francisco Reparations Committee Recommends One-Time $5M Payment to Longtime Black Residents, An Apology for ‘Decades of Harm.’ By Niko Mann / Atlanta Black Star
The San Francisco African American Reparations Advisory Committee wants the city to pay longtime residents millions of dollars and has advised the city to erase all financial debt for Black residents.
This recommendation comes in a draft proposal submitted to the San Francisco Board of Supervisors on Dec. 23. The committee recommended providing Black residents of the city with a one-time payment of $5 million as amends for systematic repression suffered by Black Americans. Residents must prove they’ve been a resident for at least 10 years and be at least 18. Read more
Ethics / Morality / Religion
Catholics must be ‘active participants’ in MLK’s ‘unfinished’ work, Cardinal Gregory says. By Richard Szczepanowski / NCR
Washington Cardinal Wilton Gregory celebrates the annual Mass commemorating the legacy of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. on Jan. 15, 2023 at St. Joseph Church in Upper Marlboro, Maryland.
The cardinal told those at the Mass that “despite the God-given progress for which we must also today offer prayers of thanksgiving,” society must address “the unfinished agenda (of Dr. King) that still confronts our society each and every day.” “We are still a nation with too many strangers. Our lives — when they do not intersect in open hostility — still seem to pass as parallel lines often at great distance from each other,” he said. “We are still discovering, and frequently with great surprise, that we are a diverse people, and that diversity, far from being a threat, can be and ought to be received as a blessing. “ Read more
A Revelatory Tour of Martin Luther King Jr.’s Forgotten Teachings. By Ezra Klein / NYT Podcast
The Political theorist Brandon Terry explores the nonviolent philosophy of Dr. King
There’s perhaps no scholar working today who studies Dr. King’s political philosophy as deeply as Brandon Terry. Terry is the John L. Loeb associate professor of social sciences at Harvard, where he specializes in Black political thought. He is the co-editor of “To Shape a New World: Essays on the Political Philosophy of Martin Luther King, Jr.,” the editor of “Fifty Years Since MLK,” and the author of numerous popular and academic articles on King’s political thought. Listen here
Related: Guaranteed Income Programs Are Martin Luther King Jr.’s Legacy. By Natalie Foster / TNR
Related: Martin Luther King Jr.’s son defends new monument amid criticism. By Tre’Vaughn / CBS News
Religion 102: Secular Humanism. By Ojibwa / Daily Kos
Leonardo da Vinci’s Man (c. 1490)
In 1973, Paul Kurtz and Edwin Wilson, under the auspices of the American Humanist Association, drafted the Humanist Manifesto II which defined humanism as secular and nonreligious. In 1980, philosopher Paul Kurtz and others organized the Council for Democratic and Secular Humanism (CODESH) and in 1996 this became the Council for Secular Humanism. Read more
Historical / Cultural
How a Sunken Slave Ship Set Off “a Search for Ourselves.” By Sam Jones / Mother Jones
More than 200 captive Africans were lost when the São José Paquete D’Africa went down in 1794.
In 2015, a delegation from the Smithsonian Institution travelled to Mozambique to inform the Makua people of a singular and long-overdue discovery. Two hundred and twenty-one years after it sank in treacherous waters off Cape Town, claiming the lives of 212 enslaved people, the wreck of the Portuguese slave ship the São José Paquete D’Africa had been found. When told the news, a Makua leader responded with a gesture that no one on the delegation will ever forget. Read more
James Weldon Johnson, Langston Hughes, and the Ever-Deferred Dream. By Amy Kittelstrom / AAIHS
Collage Photo of Langston Hughes by Carl Van Vechten 1936 (Wikimedia) & James Weldon Johnson, poet, lyricist, author and civil rights activist (NYPL)
Once Africans began being forced onto ships bound for America, their self-will—their inner knowledge of their right to their own liberty—began powering their resistance to the unrelenting oppression they now faced. They and their descendants waged a “constant struggle” to overcome what James Weldon Johnson (1871-1938) described as “the unremitting pressure of unfairness, injustice, wrong, cruelty, contempt, and hate.” Read more
New biography details important social experiment in Springfield. By G. Michale Dobbs / The Reminder
The city of Springfield in 1940 was the location for an important test concerning how African-American children viewed themselves. The results of this experiment were the subject of much controversy and influence according to Tim Spofford, the author of the new book, “What the Children Told Us,” the biography of African-American researchers and activists Kenneth and Mamie Clark.
The author said his book doesn’t just discuss the Springfield experiment, but the lives of achievements of Kenneth and Mamie Clark. Among their many accomplishments were the establishment of the first Black think tank as a well as a clinic in Harlem. The Harlem Youth Opportunity Program was another creation. Mamie Clark help founded Headstart and the Northside Center for Child Development in New York City. The two were “major figures in American life,” Spofford said. Read more
The Evolution of Quinta Brunson. By Amira Castilla / The Root
The Buzzfeed alum is now a major award-winning actor, producer, and writer.
The triple-threat actor, writer, and producer, Quinta Brunson, has been sweeping the awards shows this season, so it’s about time to look back at how she became the talent she is today! Here is the evolution of meme star, Quinta Brunson. Read more
What makes that song swing? At last, physicists unravel a jazz mystery. By Maria Godoy / NPR
Jazz saxophonist Joshua Redman plays in 2019. Swing is an essential component of nearly all kinds of jazz music. Physicists think that subtle nuances in the timing of soloists are key to creating that propulsive swing feel.
Swing has long been considered an essential component of almost all types of jazz, from traditional to bepop to post-bop. As Ella Fitzgerald and many others have sung, “It don’t mean a thing if it ain’t got that swing.” You might describe swing as a rhythmic phenomenon in jazz performances — a propulsive, groovy feeling that makes you want to move with the music. Fittingly, physicists now think they’ve got an answer to the secret of swing — and it all has to do with subtle nuances in the timing of soloists. Read more
Sports
I Saw Horrific Things When I Played in the NFL. By Nate Jackson / The Atlantic
Half of football is enduring pain. The other half is inflicting it.
Once, I was knocked momentarily unconscious in a nationally televised game. The trainer rushed out, and I came to while he was still holding my head and neck. I knew the cameras would be on me, so I moved my arms and legs around to let my mother know that I wasn’t paralyzed. I’m fine, Ma! No biggie! Pretending not to be hurt is the norm. You just hit me as hard as you could, and guess what? It didn’t hurt! Half of football is enduring pain. The other half is inflicting it. But as a prepubescent freshman with no football experience, I was absorbing more than I was dishing out. Read more
Warriors return to White House, meet with Biden after passing on Trump. By Glynn A. Hill / Wash Post
Vice President Harris welcomed her hometown Golden State Warriors back to the White House on Tuesday to celebrate their 2022 NBA championship.
“As a very proud daughter of Oakland, California, it gives me immense personal pride as the vice president of the United States to say, ‘Dub Nation is in the house!’ ” she said. “My family and my Bay Area friends are among the many who are gathered here to congratulate our Golden State Warriors, the 2022 NBA champions.” Read more
M.L.B. Works to Build a New Generation of Black American Players. By David Waldstein / NYT
While no American-born Black players participated in last year’s World Series, an effort has been in place for years to reverse declines in participation. Shown is Credit…
Martin Luther King Jr.’s “I Have a Dream” speech, layered with modern beats, flowed from a loudspeaker as a group of young men, virtually all of them American-born Black baseball players, took batting practice at the annual Dream Series this past weekend. Tony Reagins, the Major League Baseball executive behind the event, turned to a visitor and said, “When was the last time you heard a Dr. King speech during B.P.?” Read more
Black interim coaches face a steep climb. Will Carolina elevate Steve Wilks? By Michael Lee / Wash Post
Wilks took over as interim coach when the Panthers fired Matt Rhule in October.
Wilks is in position to become the full-time head coach of his hometown NFL team. He would be the first full-time Black head coach in the history of the Panthers, one of three Black head coaches in the league and the 25th since 1989 — all stubbornly low numbers in a league where nearly 60 percent of the players are Black. Read more
Howard University men’s basketball team tackles maternal health. By Justin Gamble / CNN
Howard University men’s basketball players and staff attend the Black Maternal Health panel at the Congressional Black Caucus Annual Legislative Conference.
Howard team coaches say the players decided to focus on the issue after the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade last year – a controversial decision that is expected to leave millions of Black and brown women without access to abortion care. In many states, Black and Hispanic women receive abortions at higher rates than White women, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, which collects data from state health agencies. Read more
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