Featured

Is Trump Hell? By Maureen Dowd / NYT

Biden flew to Pennsylvania on Friday to visit Valley Forge and make a pugnacious speech invoking an earlier moment when we were fighting against despotism and clinging to a dream of a democracy.

In a discontented winter during the American Revolution, George Washington tried to inspire his downtrodden troops at Valley Forge by having Thomas Paine’s “The American Crisis” read to them. “These are the times that try men’s souls,” Paine wrote, adding, “Tyranny, like hell, is not easily conquered.” As the voting to determine the next president gets underway, it is clear that the tyrannical Trump won’t be easily conquered. And that is our hell. Read more

Political / Social

Trump the Confederate. By Kirk Swearingen / Salon

The Supreme Court should consider those fake elector documents as MAGA’s de facto proclamation of secession

Even if you aren’t a so-called originalist or textualist (or, let’s just make a fun new term up: wordualist) in your reading of the Constitution, which all the conservative judges on the Supreme Court more or less are, there’s nothing to the argument that this applies only to the traitorous men, former officers of the United States, who served the Confederacy. It may have been ratified, in the summer of 1868, to account for such actions by public servants, but it was adopted to protect the country and the individual states from such behavior in the future. Read more

When I watch Jan. 6 footage I see a wall of white racists foaming at the mouth. By Denise Oliver Velez / Daily Kos

As I look at photos and video footage of the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol, the Black people I see were defenders—either Capitol or Metropolitan Police, Black members of Congress and their staff, or other Capitol workers.

The attackers, a mob of thousands of overwhelmingly white faces, are described as “insurrectionists.” Yet for me and other Black folks I know, the members of that mob evoked images of past assaults on our communities: massacres in Tulsa, Rosewood, East St Louis, Chicago, and New York City—just to name a few. The legacy of lynching was evoked on Jan. 6 by an all-too-familiar noose. Read more

The Claudine Gay Debacle Was Never About Merit. By Tressie McMillan Cottom / NYT

Claudine Gay’s resignation this week as Harvard University’s president marks the end of a shameful chapter for the institution.

The debacle’s architects promise to make America’s elite institutions great again. They say they pushed out Dr. Gay and, nearly a month ago, the University of Pennsylvania’s president as a warning to the nation’s cultural institutions. How they will continue to wield their influence and if they will succeed depends on how willing we all are to keep buying age-old ideas about merit from power-hungry peddlers. Read more

The anti-DEI movement has gone from fringe to mainstream. Here’s what that means for corporate America. By Joelle Emerson / Fortune

Billionaire investor Bill Ackman has emerged as the new figurehead for the anti-DEI movement. JEENAH MOON—BLOOMBERG/GETTY IMAGES

When diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) work was thrust into the national spotlight, it was on the heels of universally condemned, horrific tragedies: the murders of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, and Ahmaud Arbery. DEI efforts, which have existed for decades in higher education and the corporate sector, quickly became one of the ways we as a society sought to fix the wrongs of racial injustice. Just three years later, the term DEI has become weaponized and cast as the villain in the economic or social issue of the moment. This year alone, it’s been blamed for a bank collapse, a train derailment, and, most recently, antisemitism on college campuses. Read more

GOP candidates skip Iowa’s only minority-focused forum. By Nnamdi Egwuonwu / NBC News

Former state Rep. Wayne Ford sits in his Urban Dreams offices in Des Moines, Iowa, in 2015.

Nearly every Republican presidential candidate has rejected an offer to participate in what the organizer describes as the nation’s oldest minority-focused presidential forum, despite GOP optimism — and repeated campaign trail comments from several candidates — about improving the party’s performance with voters of color in 2024. Read more

Voting Rights Act’s legal challenges to watch in 2024. By Hansi Lo Wang / NPR

In ongoing redistricting lawsuits mainly across the South, Republican state officials have been raising novel arguments that threaten to erode a key set of protections against racial discrimination in the election process.

While critics have been challenging what the Justice Department has called “the most successful piece of civil rights legislation ever adopted by the United States Congress” since shortly after it was first enacted in 1965, many voting rights experts say the Supreme Court’s current conservative supermajority has inspired new legal strategies. Read more

How Mass Immigration Hurts Black Americans. By Roger House / The Daily Beast

The Congressional Black Caucus (CBC) has an obligation to its base—which means taking a different approach than most Democrats to the migrant crisis.

Immigration is among the most wrenching political questions of the 2024 election. Yet, when Congress resumes debate on border security in January, the Congressional Black Caucus (CBC) has an obligation to act on behalf of its base. That’s because the Black community is disproportionately impacted by the current policy on immigration—and the unpredictable border surges of “asylum seekers.” Read more

Why New York Has Faltered in Making Childbirth Safer for Black Mothers. By Joseph Goldstein / NYT

Proposals to reverse stark racial disparities in who dies during childbirth face deep-rooted obstacles, including hospital quality and the pandemic’s uneven aftereffects. The family of Christine Fields, who died last year after giving birth at Woodhull Medical Center, a public hospital in Brooklyn. Credit…Kirsten Luce for The New York Times

Late last year, a 30-year-old woman, Christine Fields, died after giving birth at a public hospital in Brooklyn. Both Ms. Fields and Ms. Semple who also died at the same hospital were Black. Their deaths have made Woodhull a symbol of one of the most striking racial disparities in New York: Black women are nine times more likely to die from pregnancy or childbirth than white women in New York City, a far starker disparity than the national one. Read more

Online racism is linked to PTSD symptoms in Black youth, study finds. By Claretta Bellamy / NBC News

According to a study published Wednesday in the journal JAMA Psychiatry, Black children and teens who experience racial discrimination online may develop symptoms related to post-traumatic stress disorder.

Those PTSD symptoms, the researchers found, were also potentially linked to suicidal thoughts. The suicide rates of Black youth have risen over the past two decades, said study co-author Ashley Denise Maxie-Moreman, PhD, a pediatric clinical psychologist at Children’s National Hospital in Washington, D.C. A 2023 report from Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health found that from 2007 to 2020, the suicide rate in Black children and teens ages 10 to 17 increased by 144% — the fastest increase compared to other racial and ethnic groups. The researchers suspected that online racism might play a role in suicide risk. Read more

Ethics / Morality / Religion

Biden to visit Mother Emanuel AME Church as South Carolina primaries approach. By Adelle M. Banks / RNS

‘I would hope and pray that the community comes and hears and gets excited, gets energized about the 2024 election,’ said the church’s pastor.

President Joe Biden plans to give an address at Mother Emanuel African Methodist Church in Charleston, South Carolina, on Monday (Jan. 8) as he prepares for the Democratic Party’s first primary of the 2024 presidential cycle. The Rev. Eric S.C. Manning said the president also will meet with families of “the Emanuel Nine,” the people who were killed in the 2015 massacre at the church by a white supremacist who attended a Bible study there before opening fire. Biden is also expected to address concerns about hatred, democracy and freedom, themes he raised in a speech Friday, the day before the third anniversary of the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol. Read more

Famous Preacher T.D. Jakes Denies He Attended Sex Parties With Diddy.

Bishop T.D. Jakes has palled around with Oprah and Obama, but his association with the rapper has turned into a holy headache.

When Sean “Diddy” Combs accepted a Lifetime Achievement Award from BET in 2022, the rapper gave shoutouts to supporters who “lifted me up in prayer.” Among them were Kim Porter, the late mother of his children, and his ex-girlfriend and R&B artist Cassie, who filed a sexual assault lawsuit against him last year that was so disturbing it came with a trigger warning. He then named one famous helper in particular: megachurch pastor Bishop T.D. Jakes. In recent weeks, the Texas preacher has been at the center of a social media rumor mill accusing him of appearing at Diddy’s sex-charged parties. One TikTok user’s video circulating the unconfirmed accusations has 1.8 million views. Read more

How Trump Captured Iowa’s Religious Right. By Benjamin Wallace-Wells / The New Yorker

The state’s evangelical voters were once skeptical of the former President. Now they are among his strongest supporters.

The next day, Mike Huckabee was scheduled to appear at the church. The following Tuesday, it would be Ben Carson. I had assumed that their host would be, like them, a long-standing member of the religious right, but when I met Hall he told me that he had never been very politically involved before Trump’s loss in 2020. But he was certain that Joe Biden had stolen that election, and for him that conviction tended to color everything: “If an election can be stolen, so can anything—our rights, our freedoms, our property, guns, anything.” Read more

January 6th insurrection anniversary: Mike Johnson and the radical evangelical Christians who encouraged the Capitol riot. By Molly Olmstead / Slate

Mike Johnson has deep ties to groups that encouraged the Capitol raid—out of conviction that they’re in a literal battle between supernatural forces of good and evil

Johnson’s more genteel way of politics may not fit with the image of a rabid crowd storming the Capitol, but he does have something in common with many of the Jan. 6ers: a profound religious conviction in his own cause. In many ways, Johnson seems like a classic leader of the Christian right. His legal career focused on elevating protections for “religious liberty” over the rights of the LGBTQ community. At a more personal level, he hits the traditional cultural markers, taking, for example, his commitments to marriage and avoiding porn to extremes. Scholars of the Christian right have characterized him as a textbook Christian nationalist. Read more

Historical / Cultural

70 years after Brown vs. Board of Education, public schools still deeply segregated. By Erica Frankenberg / The Conversation

Public school students today are the most racially diverse in U.S. history. At the time of Brown, about 90% of students were white and most other students were Black.

Today, according to a 2022 federal report, 46% of public school students are white, 28% are Hispanic, 15% are Black, 6% Asian, 4% multiracial and 1% American Indian. Based on my analysis of 2021 federal education data, public schools in 22 states and Washington, D.C., served majorities of students of color. And yet, public schools are deeply segregated. In 2021, approximately 60% of Black and Hispanic public school students attended schools where 75% or more of students were students of color. Black and Hispanic students who attend racially segregated schools also are overwhelmingly enrolled in high-poverty schools. Read more

U.S. Mint Releases Coins Honoring Harriet Tubman. By / Huff Post

The release of the three coins comes nearly four years after legislation was introduced to commemorate the abolitionist and activist.

The agency had announced its preorder sale Wednesday in a news release. The coins — a $5 gold, $1 silver and half-dollar clad — display portraits of Tubman at different points in her life. Varying in price, they can be bought individually or together in a three-coin proof set, which costs $836.25. Read more

‘Equality’ says the path has always been fraught. Review by Becca Rothfeld / Wash Post

Darrin M. McMahon’s wide-ranging history demonstrates that progress toward achieving equality is almost never linear

Is inequality on the defense or on the rise? In his ambitious new book, “Equality: The History of an Elusive Idea,” Dartmouth history professor Darrin M. McMahon proposes that the “elusive idea” in question is expansive enough to vindicate both accounts. His wide-ranging survey of equality throughout the ages demonstrates that progress toward achieving it is almost never linear. When civilizations promote parity along one axis, they tend to lapse back toward hierarchy along another. Read more

Katt Williams Goes After Kevin Hart, Joe Rogan, and More. By Craig Jenkins and Hershal Pandya / New York Magazine

On January 3, the internet was stopped in its tracks as Williams sat down for a nearly three-hour tour-de-force interview with ESPN First Take correspondent Shannon Sharpe on his podcast, Club Shay Shay.

“The reason I had to come is because you’ve made a safe place for the truth to be told,” Williams said at the top of the interview. “And I have watched all of these lowbrow comedians come here and disrespect you in your face and tell you straight-up lies.” Was he there to “set the record straight”? Sharpe asked in reply. Apparently so.

Nikki Haley talked about her ‘Black friends.’ What do data and history show about friend groups? By Phillip Bump / Wash Post

There are few defenses from White people against allegations of racial insensitivity more notorious than “I have Black friends.”

“It was not just slavery that was talked about,” Haley said. “It was more about racism that was talked about. It was more about, you know, we had friends, we had Black friends, we had White friends. But it was always a topic of conversation, even among our friends.” But let’s set that aside and consider a related question: How many people of all backgrounds have friends across racial lines?“About 40 percent of white Americans and about 25 percent of non-white Americans are surrounded exclusively by friends of their own race,” Reuters’s Lindsay Dunsmuir wrote. Read more

Black Music Sunday: Winter moons and wintry tunes. By Denise Oliver Velez / Daily Kos

Gil Scott Heron.

Scott Heron was yet another artist trapped in that frozen winter of addiction, yet he was able to bring a spring of spiritual and political awakening to his audiences. Mixing his unique, highly politicized, and verbally complex poetry with minimal percussion in the early 1970s, and developing a speaking/singing soul-jazz form he christened “bluesology,” performer Gil Scott-Heron has been widely credited with helping to invent rap. Read more and listen here.

Sports

Coco Gauff gears up for Australian Open with Auckland triumph. By The Athletic Staff

Coco Gauff warmed up for the Australian Open by beating Elina Svitolina to defend her Auckland Classic crown.

The US Open champion and world No. 3 came from behind to win 6-7 (4-7) 6-3 6-3 and record her seventh WTA title. Read more

Naomi Osaka Book Reveals: Beating Serena Williams, Firing Her Coach. By Madeline Roth / The Daily Beast

A new book, “Naomi Osaka: Her Journey to Finding Her Power and Her Voice,” traces the tennis superstar’s turbulent road to the top.

The timing couldn’t be more perfect for a biography on tennis superstar Naomi Osaka. After a break starting in September 2022 and the birth of a daughter, the reinvigorated 26-year-old returned for her first tournament at the elite level this past week. Unfortunately, her big comeback ended in a second-round loss to three-time champion Karolína Plíšková in the Brisbane International, but Naomi was unfazed: “Ngl that was really fun though,” she wrote after the match. Read more

Andscape roundtable: What Willie Simmons’ Florida A&M exit means for HBCU football coaches. By Andscape Staff

Talking the offseason coaching carousel, the ‘Deion Sanders Effect’ and more. Florida A&M head coach Willie Simmons holds the Orange Blossom Classic trophy after defeating Jackson State at Hard Rock Stadium on Sept. 3, 2023, in Miami Gardens, Florida.

Andscape senior editor Erik Horne, writer-at-large William C. Rhoden, senior HBCU writer Mia Berry and ESPN associate editor for trending topics Kalan Hooks discuss the football coaching carousel at historically Black colleges and universities in the offseason. Already, Southern (Eric Dooley) and Grambling (Hue Jackson) have fired their coaches, Texas Southern (Clarence McKinney) and Alcorn State (Fred McNair) did not renew their coaches’ contracts, and Florida A&M lost its coach, Willie Simmons, to a Power 5 conference school. In the video, the group discusses: Read more

Site Information

Articles appearing in the Digest are archived on our home page. And at the top of this page register your email to receive notification of new editions of Race Inquiry Digest.

Click here for earlier Digests. The site is searchable by name or topic. See “search” at the top of this page.

About Race Inquiry and Race Inquiry Digest. The Digest is published on Mondays and Thursdays.

Use the customized buttons below to share the Digest in an email, or post to your Facebook, Linkedin or Twitter accounts.

Race Inquiry

Important Current Stories On Race In America

Race Inquiry Digest (Jan 8) – Important Current Stories On Race In America

Subscribe to Blog via Email

Featured

Political / Social

Ethics / Morality / Religion

Historical / Cultural

Sports

Site Information

Like this:

Subscribe to Blog via Email

Featured

Political / Social

Ethics / Morality / Religion

Historical / Cultural

Sports

Site Information

Share this:

Like this: