Featured
McDonald’s Is The Latest Company To Roll Back Diversity Goals. By Dee-ann Durbin / HuffPost
McDonald’s is ending some of its diversity practices, citing a U.S. Supreme Court decision that outlawed affirmative action in college admissions.
Four years after launching a push for more diversity in its ranks, McDonald’s is ending some of its diversity practices, citing a U.S. Supreme Court decision that outlawed affirmative action in college admissions. McDonald’s is the latest big company to shift its tactics in the wake of the 2023 ruling and a conservative backlash against diversity, equity and inclusion programs. Walmart, John Deere, Harley-Davidson and others rolled back their DEI initiatives last year. Read more
Related: Boardroom diversity stalls as DEI backlash spreads. By Isla Binnie / USA Today
Related: Trump’s Attack on D.E.I. Will Cost Us All. By Farah Stockman / NYT
Political / Social
Billionaires court Trump at Mar-a-Lago, his “center of the universe.” By Daria Solovieva / Salon
From Tesla’s Elon Musk to a lesser known UAE real estate power broker, the wealthiest are flocking to Florida
Some, like Elon Musk, are well-known, ubiquitous entities. The CEO of Tesla and SpaceX has become Trump’s frequent companion and adviser, popping up at his New Year’s Eve bash, at meetings with other tech CEOs or on calls with global leaders. He invested more than $270 million in Trump’s campaign and has become the incoming president’s neighbor/tenant at Mar-a-Lago, according to reporting from The New York Times. Read more
Related: Trump’s Return Is a Civil Society Failure. By Thomas B. Edsall / NYT
Why Trump’s Inauguration Falling on MLK Day is Painfully Ironic. By Allison Wiltz / Level
Some Americans will celebrate a civil rights leader, and others, a man who opposes racial progress
As fate would have it, the inauguration of the forty-seventh president, Donald Trump, will fall on Martin Luther King Jr. Day, on January 20th. Such a day practically begs us to draw a comparison between these two men. There’s a painful irony in a nation celebrating a man whose decisions have perpetuated harm against the black community while at the same time honoring one of the most prolific civil rights leaders in American history. Read more
Related: ‘Another Bloodbath’ Would Have Happened If Harris Had Won, Democratic Senator Says. By
Louisiana: Racism Doesn’t Exist Anymore, So Let Us Racially Gerrymander. By Kate Riga / TPM
Republican state officials and legislators in Louisiana argued to the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals on Tuesday that the state has moved past racial discrimination in voting — and so should be allowed to suppress Black voting power with impunity.
In the newest attack on the hollowed-out Voting Rights Act, red states and right-wing lawyers are trying to stretch the Supreme Court’s disastrous decision in Shelby County v. Holder to other parts of the law. In that 2013 decision, the conservative justices ruled that because racism isn’t so bad anymore, states with histories of egregious voter discrimination should be free to continue the practice without having to first get permission, or preclearance, from the federal government. Read more
Race on Campus: Can colleges attract Latino students with colorblind strategies? By Fernanda Zamudio-Suarez / Chronicle of Higher Ed
If a new Utah state law bans public colleges from various diversity, equity, and inclusion work, how do colleges recruit and retain Latino students?That’s the central tension at Weber State University, in Utah, where the Latino population is booming, according to the U.S. Census Bureau.
To be compliant with the new state law, Weber State’s president shut down the institution’s existing cultural center. Now, he is tasked with figuring out how to keep recruiting and retaining Latino students with colorblind strategies. Our J. Brian Charles has the story. Read more
Years after Floyd’s death, Minneapolis and DOJ agree to police changes. By David Nakamura / Wash Post
City leaders approved the plan, which came after a Justice Department investigation found systemic use of excessive force.
The legally binding consent decree marks a victory for the Biden administration in its efforts to use federal power to require local police departments to pursue broad changes. Under Attorney General Merrick Garland, the Justice Department has opened a dozen “pattern or practice” civil investigations into state or local law enforcement agencies. Read more
World News
Elon Musk goes global with his playbook for political influence. By Cat Zakrzewski / Wash Post
The X owner and tech billionaire has boosted far-right figures in Britain, Germany and Canada with a blizzard of social media posts in recent days.
In the new year, Musk is flexing his political muscle on the global stage as well. He appears to be applying a playbook similar to the one he used to disrupt American politics, now boosting conservative politicians in the governments of the United States’ top allies. But his disregard for the veracity of his posts and his elevation of far-right and extremist figures have alarmed liberal leaders around the world. Read more
The Voice of South Africa’s First Post-Apartheid Generation. Lynsey Chutel / NYT
Thandiswa Mazwai performing in Midrand, South Africa, in September. Ms. Mazwai has used her mezzo-soprano voice to amplify South Africa’s struggles.
At a gala dinner held soon after South Africa’s most contested election since the end of apartheid, a singer reminded the gathered politicians how to do their jobs. “I want to implore you to think of the people of this country, and to think about why you have been chosen,” the singer, Thandiswa Mazwai, told the political elite at the June gala, put on by the Independent Electoral Commission in Johannesburg to mark the release of the vote’s final results. Read more
Massacre Upon Massacre: Haiti’s Bleak Spiral Into a Failed State. David C. Adams and Frances Robles / NYT
Journalists climb a wall to take cover from gunfire after being shot at by armed gangs at the General Hospital in Port-au-Prince.
A fresh injection of about 150 foreign officers arrived in Haiti this weekend to bolster an international security force charged with taking on the powerful and well-armed gangs that have inflicted so much misery on the country for months. But if the past is any guide this latest infusion is unlikely to make much of a difference. Read more
These Black Celebs Are Now Ghanaian Citizens As African Nation’s ‘Year Of The Return’ Program Expands. By Nahlah Abdur-Rahman / Black Enterprise
Dr. Umar Johnson, Yandy, and Mendeecees Harris joined 500 others in a Detty December citizenship ceremony. A month prior, Ghana granted the legal status to its largest cohort of people from across the Black Diaspora. According to ABC News, the majority hailed from the United States.
Ghana has encouraged Black people globally to reconnect with the motherland through its “Year Of The Return” program. Its 2019 launch coincided with the 400 year anniversary of when the first enslaved people arrived to America in 1619. Ghana’s Tourism Authority and the Office of Diaspora Affairs oversaw its extension and renamed it “Beyond The Return.” Read more
Ethics / Morality / Religion
Cardinal McElroy to face challenges in Trump’s Washington. By Brian Fraga / NCR
Washington Cardinal Wilton Gregory and Cardinal Robert McElroy leave a Jan. 6, 2025, news conference at the Cathedral of St. Matthew the Apostle in Washington
“Many of us thought he was too progressive to be the archbishop of Washington, D.C., and that appointing him to the nation’s capital was going to be too bold, too strong a statement, because he is far more progressive than the center of the [U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops] on gay rights, synodality, immigrants, on almost anything,” Faggioli said. Read more
What People Get Wrong About Christian Women Who Voted for Trump. By Nina Martin / Mother Jones
He said, “I want to protect the women.” They believe him.
It’s this sense of having a protector and a defender in Trump. That operates on a symbolic level in terms of: “He’s going to protect us from this woke liberal elite that wants to take us down and destroy us.” This idea was captured by one of the Trump campaign’s most effective ads: “She’s for they/them. I’m for you.” Read more
Why Mike Johnson’s fake “Jefferson prayer” matters. By Amanda Marcotte / Salon
Replacing facts with phony history is a linchpin of the Christian nationalist movement
As the Thomas Jefferson Foundation notes on its website, Jefferson doubted “the efficacy of prayer.” They add that “Jefferson rejected the notion of the Trinity and Jesus’ divinity. He rejected Biblical miracles, the resurrection, the atonement, and original sin.” He saw Jesus as a secular philosopher and wasn’t a “Christian” in the way most people understand the term. Read more
Historical / Cultural
Not all insurrections are equal – for enslaved Americans, it was the only option. By Deion Scott Hawkins / The Conversation
In an article published in the academic journal American Behavioral Scientist, my colleague Sharifa-Simon Roberts and I argue that any discussion about American insurrections must include the experiences of Black rebellions.
In my view, what happened on Jan. 6, 2021, was a co-option of a Black liberation tactic that was used to remedy an injustice enshrined in the law. But unlike Trump’s false claims of voter fraud, which were legally challenged and proved untrue, insurrections by enslaved people were based on a legitimate flaw in the U.S. Constitution – the denial of full citizenship based on skin color and race. Read more
How Hitler Dismantled a Democracy in 53 Days. By Timothy W. Ryback / The Atlantic
He used the constitution to shatter the constitution. Adolf Hitler and his cabinet, January 30, 1933, the day he became Chancellor of Germany.
Ninety-two years ago this month, on Monday morning, January 30, 1933, Adolf Hitler was appointed the 15th chancellor of the Weimar Republic. In one of the most astonishing political transformations in the history of democracy, Hitler set about destroying a constitutional republic through constitutional means. What follows is a step-by-step account of how Hitler systematically disabled and then dismantled his country’s democratic structures and processes in less than two months’ time—specifically, one month, three weeks, two days, eight hours, and 40 minutes. The minutes, as we will see, mattered. Read more
History’s Lessons on Anti-Immigrant Extremism. Michael Luo / The New Yorker
President-elect Donald Trump has vowed to begin enacting the anti-immigrant agenda at the center of his campaign the moment he takes office: mass deportations, a crackdown on people “pouring up through Mexico and other places,” even the elimination of birthright citizenship.
The scale of what Trump has promised is difficult to fathom and without recent precedent. A century and a half ago, however, a movement to cast out a different group of people began to accelerate in the United States. Donald Trump’s recent assertion that he would use executive action to abolish birthright citizenship has a historical link to the Chinese American experience. Read more
Inside The Quest To Save America’s Oldest Incorporated Black Town Of Brooklyn, Illinois. By Nahlah Abdur-Rahman / Black Enterprise
Established in the 1830s, Brooklyn started as a refuge for free and enslaved Black people.
Brooklyn, Illinois, considered the oldest Black settlements in U.S. history, is dying, leaving its legacy at risk. According to TheChicago Tribune, the area has a storied history as one of the first majority-Black towns in the country to incorporate. Established in the 1830s, Brooklyn started as a refuge for free and enslaved Black people along the Mississippi river, once noted as a key outpost for the Underground Railroad. According to oral history, “Mother” Priscilla Baltimore led 11 Black families, some escaping slavery, to the area across from St. Louis. Read more
Where to start with: Zora Neale Hurston. By Colin Grant / The Guardian
From befriending the last African enslaved in the US to meeting with zombies in Haiti, the folklorist, anthropologist and Harlem Renaissance writer – who has a novel posthumously published today – was a sensitive chronicler of other people’s lives.
Today, on what would have been Zora Neale Hurston’s 134th birthday, a posthumous novel by the American writer and cultural anthropologist has been published. The Life of Herod the Great, which Hurston was working on when she died in 1960, is a sequel to her 1939 novel Moses, Man of the Mountain, and up until now has been accessible only to scholars. Read more
The History of The Isley Brothers. By Angela Johnson / The Root
Even if you weren’t around when the band got their start in the late 1950s, you’ve definitely experienced the music of The Isley Brothers. With a sound that combines R&B, rock, funk and soul, their music has been been heavily sampled and covered by the likes of Ice Cube, The Beatles and Whitney Houston.
To this day, The Isley Brothers are the only act in history to hit the Billboard Hot 100 in six consecutive decades: The 1950s, 1960s, 1970s, 1980s, 1990s and 2000s. Here is their story. Read more
Sports
Steph Curry and the NBA’s most confounding paradox. By Tim Keown / ESPN
This season, it feels as if each Curry basket is a victory over nature. He has always been the focus of everything around him, but never before as he is now, on a flawed Warriors team that is contending with a paradox: determined to use him less than ever at a time when it needs him the most.
Curry is 16 seasons into this and 36 years on Earth, and they’re still there, one generation seeping into the next, making him fight for every inch. Nobody else, not Luka or Kyrie or Tatum or LeBron, puts up with this much aggravation. Read more
Black coaching pioneer Tyrone Willingham wants success for Penn State’s James Franklin, Notre Dame’s Marcus Freeman. By William C. Rhoden / Andscape
Notre Dame head coach Tyrone Willingham leads his team onto the field for a game against Michigan State University at Notre Dame Stadium on Sept. 20, 2003.
Freemen, Franklin and Willingham represent three different generations of the struggle Black coaches have faced in an effort to level the playing field and open opportunities in college football. It’s an industry that largely runs on Black bodies but has been reluctant to have Black bodies patrol the sidelines as head coaches. Read more
Lamar Jackson isn’t just this season’s NFL MVP. He’s the MVP of an idea. By William C. Rhoden / Andscape
Baltimore Ravens quarterback Lamar Jackson celebrates after a pass against the Cleveland Browns at M&T Bank Stadium on Jan. 4 in Baltimore. With a 35-10 victory over the Cleveland Browns on Saturday, the Baltimore Ravens clinched the AFC North for the second consecutive season.
Ravens quarterback Lamar Jackson, the most dynamic QB of his generation, made a final convincing argument to receive a second consecutive league MVP award and third overall. Jackson filled up the record book. He became the first player in NFL history to reach 4,000 passing yards and 900 rushing yards in the same season. Those 4,000 passing yards surpassed Jackson’s 3,678 total from last season when he was voted league MVP in a virtual landslide. Read more
Coco Gauff earns statement win over Iga Świątek to lead the US to United Cup title. By Matias Grez / CNN
Coco Gauff led the United States to its second United Cup title with a statement 6-4, 6-4 win over world No. 2 Iga Świątek a week before the start of the Australian Open.
Gauff, the world No. 3, has now won two straight matches against Świątek after previously winning just one of their first 12 meetings, with one of the main rivalries on the women’s tour now looking less lopsided. Read more
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