Tucker Carlson huddled in a low-ceilinged dungeon that had served as a holding pen for Africans bound for enslavement in the United States. It was a July day in 2003 in Ghana, and Carlson stood alongside some of America’s most prominent civil rights leaders. The conservative commentator, who at the time co-hosted the CNN show “Crossfire,” walked through the memorial, where a guide told how the shackled Africans who did not perish during the voyage were sold as human chattel in America. The civil rights leaders prayed, cried and sang “We Shall Overcome.” They peered toward the sea from the Door of No Return. But Carlson seemed strangely detached, according to two of the civil rights leaders who were present. Read more
Related: What Tucker Carlson Is Doing in a Fake Log Cabin. By Megan Garber / The Atlantic
The power of the Big Lie: Why do 30% of Americans cling to Trump’s dark fantasy? By Chauncey Devega / Salon
There is the Big Lie — Donald Trump’s false claims of election fraud that are driving all manner of anti-democratic beliefs and behavior. But that Big Lie is supported and reinforced by all the little lies that make it real. In a highly polarized society where one political party is attacking the foundations of democracy and the neofascist movement continues to grow, public opinion is no longer a basic matter of collective beliefs about matters of public concern. Public opinion is now a function of personal identity, existential core values and the understanding of reality itself. n search of further explanations, I reached out by email to Texas A&M communications professor Jennifer Mercieca, an expert on political rhetoric and author of the recent book “Demagogue for President: The Rhetorical Genius of Donald Trump.” Read more
The Voter Fraud Fraud. By Charles M. Blow / NYT
It was March 3, 2020, the day of the Democratic primary in Texas, and Hervis Rogers, a 62-year-old Black man, was intent on making his voice heard at the ballot box. He arrived at the polling place around 7 p.m. and joined the line. The polling place later closed to new people joining the line, but Rogers remained. Other people trickled away, unable or unwilling to wait, but Rogers remained. He stayed in that line for nearly seven hours until he was finally able to vote at 1:30 a.m. Rogers was out on parole for a 1995 second-degree felony conviction for burglary, and for him to vote in Texas is against the law — and punishable by a severe sentence, at least for those who “knowingly” violate this election law. Rogers claims that he didn’t knowingly do so, but it doesn’t matter: He is a Black man with a criminal history, a perfect boogeyman and scapegoat to help illustrate a virtually nonexistent problem of voter fraud. Read more
Republicans’ racist 2022 playbook is the same one that lost them the House, Senate, and White House. By Kerry Eleveld / Daily Kos
President Joe Biden isn’t a hot seller in the right-wing circles where Republicans need to stoke a lot of anger heading into 2022. The economy is recovering faster than most analysts predicted, in large part due to the cash infusion from the $1.9 trillion pandemic relief package passed by Democrats. So, robbed of a presidential-sized villain and an economic cudgel, Republicans are returning to their go-to bread-and-butter issues to animate their base: racism and xenophobia. Read more
Critical race theory battles are driving frustrated, exhausted educators out of their jobs. By Tyler Kingkade / NBC News
When Rydell Harrison started a new job as a school superintendent in southwestern Connecticut last August, he was excited to join a community that seemed committed to diversity and equity. The Easton, Redding and Region 9 district, which covers two small, mostly white towns, had recently established a task force and allocated money to address the racial climate in schools. That decision was a response to the hundreds of students and recent alumni who wrote to school board members following George Floyd’s murder to describe racist incidents they’d experienced or witnessed at school. To Harrison, the task force was a sign that the community sat up and listened when young people advocated for change. Read more
Related: Culture War in the Classroom. By Leo Casey / Dissent Magazine
Related: “Critical Race Theory” Delusions and Angry White Parents Will Remake Our Schools. Esther Wang / The New Republic
Robin DiAngelo Wants White Progressives to Look Inward. By Isaac Chotiner / The New Yorker
Last month, DiAngelo published a new book, “Nice Racism,” which argues that even well-intentioned white progressives—the types of people who might read DiAngelo’s work—are guilty of inflicting “racial harm” on people of color. She writes that “the odds are that on a daily basis, Black people don’t interact with those who openly agitate for white nationalism,” but they do face a different danger: “In the workplace, the classroom, houses of worship, gentrifying neighborhoods, and community groups, Black people do interact with white progressives.” She continues, “We are the ones—with a smile on our faces—who undermine Black people daily in ways both harder to identify and easier to deny.” Read more
What 2021 is showing us about Black lives mattering. By Richard J. Reddick / CNN
More than a year after the pivotal moment where millions of Americans witnessed the murder of George Floyd at the hands of those charged with the responsibility to serve and protect — and about two weeks after the salutary news that his killer would pay with a 22.5 year prison sentence — it seems like a good moment to assess what progress, if any, has been made in the social and professional advancement of Black Americans. Unfortunately (but not perhaps unsurprisingly) there are lately troubling new examples that that progress is haltingly slow. Read more
The Violence of Latinx Erasure Starts With Undercounting Victims. By Robert Lovato / The Nation
Last May, Roberto, an associate professor emeritus in the Mexican American Studies Department at the University of Arizona, released the latest iteration of one of his most important dreams: the Raza Database Project (RDP), a project aiming to document the nightmarish, violent effects of Latinx erasure. He and a team of volunteer researchers, journalists, and family members of Latinos killed by police produced a definitive report documenting an undercount of over 2,600 Latinos who have died at the hands of local police officers since 2014, a number that’s twice as large as what was previously reported. Read more
Eric Adams’s Win Is a ‘Watershed Moment’ for Black Leaders in New York. By Katie Glueck and Jeffery C. Mays / NYT
A cascade of victories for Black candidates in the New York City Democratic primaries — highlighted by Eric Adams’s win in the mayoral race — is redefining the flow of political power in the nation’s largest city. For just the second time in its history, New York City is on track to have a Black mayor. For the first time ever, the Manhattan district attorney is set to be a Black man, after Alvin Bragg won the Democratic nomination. The city’s public advocate, who is Black, cruised to victory in last month’s primary. As many as three of the five city borough presidents may be people of color, and the City Council is poised to be notably diverse. Read more
25-year-long study of Black women links frequent use of lye-based hair relaxers to a higher risk of breast cancer. By Kimberly Bertrand / The Conversation
Frequent and long-term use of lye-based hair straightening products, or relaxers, may increase the risk of breast cancer among Black women, compared with more moderate use. Boston University’s Black Women’s Health Study followed 59,000 self-identified African American women for over 25 years, sending questionnaires every two years on new diagnoses and factors that might influence their health. Using these data in our own study, my team of epidemiologists and I found that Black women who used hair products containing lye at least seven times a year for 15 or more years had an approximately 30% increased risk of estrogen receptor positive breast cancer compared with more infrequent users. Read more
Related: How Black Women Can Interpret Those Scary Health Statistics. By Jacquelynn Kerubo / NYT
Historical / Cultural
In an effort to combat rising Asian hate, Illinois requires schools to teach Asian American history. By Aysga Qamar / Daily Kos
As crimes against the Asian American Pacific Islander community increase, nationwide calls to combat hate and teach Asian American history in schools have followed. Anti-Asian bias is not new to American history and one of the ways to dismantle racism is teaching children why it’s wrong. As states across the country discuss adding race to their curriculums, Illinois has taken the plunge in becoming the first state to mandate that Asian American history be part of its public school curriculum. According to CNN, Illinois Gov. J.B. Pritzker signed a bill Friday that requires elementary and high schools to teach a unit of Asian American history beginning in the 2022-23 school year. Read more
Ada Wright, the Scottsboro Defense Campaign, and the Popular Front. By Ashley Everson / AAIHS
In the midst of the Great Depression in 1931, nine Black teenage boys were falsely convicted of allegedly raping two white women on a train in Scottsboro, Alabama. The Scottsboro Case quickly became one of the most infamous international spectacles that would eventually define the interwar period. The Scottsboro defense campaign, led by the Communist Party of the United States (CPUSA) and the International Labor Defense (ILD), emphasized that the defendants’ case should be understood in the larger context of international workers’ struggles occurring throughout the imperial world. The Party’s campaign relied on several strategies to gain international significance, however, its decision to recruit Ada Wright—the mother of Scottsboro defendants, Andy and Roy Wright— to embark on a European speaking tour, was perhaps one of the most significant strategies it utilized. Shown are Four Scottsboro mothers. Read more
How a Harlem Skyrise Got Hijacked—and Forgotten. By Sharifa Rhodes-Pitts / The Nation
In 1964, following the unrest in Harlem roused by the police murder of James Powell, age 15, the poet June Jordan received an invitation to write for Esquire. Rather than explain any of that, Jordan responded with a dream. She proposed a collaboration with the architect R. Buckminster Fuller: a radical/visionary redesign of Harlem to create an environment where such events were not possible. Years later, she called the project “a beginning,” and perhaps it is helpful to hold on to that feeling when contemplating the resulting design. Its most striking feature was 15 conical towers, 100 stories high, intended to house 500,000 people, insistently lifting Harlem and its population to the skies: upward, forward, and out of history. Read more
Black female WWII unit hoping to get congressional honor. By Michael Casey / AP and ABC News
An Army battalion that made history as the only all-female, Black unit to serve in Europe during World War II is set to be honored by Congress. Maj. Fannie Griffin McClendon and her Army colleagues never dwelled on being the only Black battalion of women to serve in Europe during World War II. They had a job to do. The 6888th Central Postal Directory Battalion was credited with solving a growing mail crisis during its stint in England and, upon their return, serving as a role model to generations of Black women who joined the military. But for decades, the exploits of the 855 members never got wider recognition — until now. The Senate passed legislation that would award members of the battalion, affectionately known as the Six Triple Eight, with the Congressional Gold Medal. Read more
What Thurgood Marshall Taught Me. By Stephen L. Carter / NYT
This June marked the 30th anniversary of Marshall’s announcement that he was retiring from the bench. And although the realization makes me dizzy, it’s been over four decades since he hired me as one of his law clerks for the 1980 term of the Supreme Court. On and off for the next dozen years, I sat at the feet of the man his clerks used to call the Judge and listened, enthralled, to his stories. During the year I worked for him, the late afternoon was often story time, when he would settle in a convenient chair and, eyes bright with memory, share details of his extraordinary career. Read more
Stacey Abrams prods our constitutional imagination. By E.J. Dionne Jr / Wash Post
The Supreme Court is deadlocked 4 to 4 on an important case. The cantankerous justice who is the swing vote falls into a coma. And guess what? There is no provision in our Constitution for what to do if a Supreme Court justice is alive but unable to carry out his or her duties. The 25th Amendment, ratified in 1967, deals with the disability of a president but not a justice. This premise animates Stacey Abrams’s engaging legal and political thriller, “While Justice Sleeps.” The author is indeed that Stacey Abrams, the Georgia lawyer, politician and organizer who narrowly missed becoming her state’s governor in 2018. Read more
Anatomy of a shutout: Why the Emmys snub Beyoncé despite her continuing to innovate on TV. By Melanie McFarland / Salon
Anyone who is at all emotionally or professionally invested in these awards knows this, but on Tuesday, fans of Beyoncé Knowles-Carter may have felt more acutely aware of this fact than others when her 2020 Disney+ special “Black Is King” was completely shut out of contention. This same voting body granted four nominations to her 2016 opus “Lemonade” and six to 2019’s “Homecoming: A Film By Beyoncé.” Neither netted a statue at their respective awards ceremonies, but given the track record it was reasonable to expect the pop performer’s third major TV feature to get at least a nomination for something. Yet not even a costume nod came its way, which is incredible considering the strength of that artistic element alone. Read more
Sports
Shohei Ohtani’s double-duty feats are a reminder: The Negro Leagues are still overlooked. By Kevin B. Blackistone / Wash Post
In the Linden Hill section of Oak Woods Cemetery in Chicago rests a headstone etched with the figure of a pitcher throwing a baseball to the figure of a catcher. The honored deceased is Ted “Double Duty” Radcliffe: born July 7, 1902, died Aug. 11, 2005. His parents didn’t nickname him Double Duty. New York baseball columnist Damon Runyon did. Why? During a 1932 doubleheader that pitted Radcliffe’s Pittsburgh Crawfords against the New York Black Yankees at Yankee Stadium, Runyon witnessed Radcliffe hit a grand slam and catch Satchel Paige’s shutout in the twi-night opener, only to turn around and throw a shutout of his own in the second game. The lore of Double Duty should be reincarnated with the rise of Shohei Ohtani, baseball’s latest two-way star. Read more
Related: Stephen A. Smith’s comments about baseball star Shohei Ohtani cause backlash and an apology. By Tom Jones / Poynter
Reggie Theus on taking the Bethune-Cookman job: ‘How can you pass that up?’ By Jean-Jacques Taylor / The Undefeated
For the past three years, Reggie Theus has been enjoying life on the golf course, putting together a potentially lucrative business venture in Las Vegas and doing enough work as a basketball analyst on radio and TV to keep him busy. Then came an opportunity to be the coach and athletic director at Bethune-Cookman University. The challenge was too enticing. “The opportunity to continue to coach and reinvent myself as AD, how can you pass that up?” Theus wondered. “Is it going to be hard? Yeah. Will I run into some snags? Of course. Is that part of the game? Absolutely.” Read more
Naomi Osaka Wins Best Female Athlete At ESPYS, Says Past Year Has Been ‘Really Tough.’ By Cole Delbyck / HuffPost
Naomi Osaka made her first ESPY Awards one to remember after shaking the sports world in recent weeks. In her first public appearance since withdrawing from the French Open and Wimbledon over mental health concerns, the four-time Grand Slam champion attended the show on Saturday night in New York City, where she picked up the award for Best Athlete, Women’s Sports. Arriving on the red carpet in a bold black and white striped top and a green Louis Vuitton skirt, the tennis superstar was accompanied by rapper boyfriend Cordae at the show, which honors the year’s top athletes and sports moments. Osaka, who has been open about her struggles with depression and social anxiety, powered through her nerves to give a short but sweet acceptance speech later in the evening. Read more
Olympian Allyson Felix Didn’t Let Motherhood Slow Her Down. By Sean Gregory / Time
Up to this point, Felix had planned to return to the track and add to her record-setting medal haul. But in that moment, the most decorated American female track-and-field Olympian of all time could not have felt farther from a finish line. “I just remember thinking, I don’t know if I’m going to get back,” says Felix. “I don’t know if I can.” Felix shares this memory from the driver’s seat of her Tesla, while crawling up a congested I-405 in Los Angeles in late May. She’s en route to a training session for the Tokyo Olympics, which will be the 35-year-old’s fifth Games. Read more
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Could genocide really happen here? Leading scholar says America is on “high alert.” By David Masciotra / Salon
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