Featured
Trump’s Attacks on Black History Betray America.
The Trump administration is in a hurry to bury not only America’s future but also its past. Burying futures usually involves burying the truths of history.
For Americans to know Black history is to know how Black ingenuity over the years has benefited them, how Black-led antiracist movements helped bring into being more equity and justice between Black people and white people, between Latino, Asian, and Native Americans and white Americans, between white men and women, between superrich white men and low- and middle-income white men. After all, the Ku Klux Klan didn’t terrorize Black Americans only. Read more
Political / Social
The Trump Trick: Pardon Black Celebs, Make It Easier to Imprison Black People. By Garrison Hayes / Mother Jones
A woman who was pardoned by the president in 2019 is now a key figure in a bizarre sleight of hand.
Trump has been on a spree this week: He’s pardoned or commuted the sentences of a host of people this week, tax fraudsters and TV personalities among them. So, how do you get one of these pardons? In my new video, I point out that if you’re Black, you should probably know Trump’s “Pardon Czar,” Alice Marie Johnson. Trump is firing entire civil rights departments, militarizing the police, and ending corruption investigations into police departments known for targeting Black people. It’s a bizarre sleight of hand. “Hey, look over here, I pardoned a Black person!”—while making it easier and easier to imprison Black people. Read more
Related: Trump’s Flurry of Pardons Signals a Wholesale Effort to Redefine Crime. By Glenn Thrush / NYT
Beyond the backlash: What evidence shows about the economic impact of DEI. By Rodney Coates / The Conversation
Few issues in the U.S. today are as controversial as diversity, equity and inclusion – commonly referred to as DEI.
Critics argue that DEI is antidemocratic, that it fosters ideological conformity and that it leads to discriminatory initiatives, which they say disadvantage white people and undermine meritocracy. Those defending DEI argue just the opposite: that it encourages critical thinking and promotes democracy − and that attacks on DEI amount to a retreat from long-standing civil rights law. Yet missing from much of the debate is a crucial question: What are the tangible costs and benefits of DEI? Who benefits, who doesn’t, and what are the broader effects on society and the economy? Read more
Related: Trump Says He Fired Director of National Portrait Gallery, Citing D.E.I. Zachary Small / NYT
Discrimination cases unravel as Trump scraps core civil rights tenet. By Julian Mark and Laura Meckler / Wash Post
The administration is dismissing cases and unwinding settlements built on “disparate impact,” which holds that even neutral policies can lead to biased outcomes.
For decades, the federal government has used data analysis to ferret out race and sex discrimination, winning court cases and reaching settlements in housing, education, policing and across American life. Now the Trump administration is working to unwind those same cases. Read more
Related: How Trump Twisted the Law to Protect White Men From Discrimination. By Matthew Wollin / Mother Jones
Stephen Miller’s deportation machine is failing — and he’s furious. By Charles R. Davis / Salon
The Trump advisor is angry that the promise of “mass deportation now” remains largely unfulfilled
The country, we were told, is awash with millions upon millions of undocumented criminals and straight-up crazy people, permitted by Democrats and their open borders to roam the land and terrorize the law-abiding white people they were meant to replace. In reality, which still holds some influence in our aggressively-online world, there are about 11 million undocumented people in the U.S., total. And despite all-caps propaganda to the contrary, they as a class “have substantially lower crime rates than native-born citizens,” according to a 2020 study; they even commit fewer crimes, on average, than fully legal immigrants — those who came here “the right way.” Read more
Related: Trump Plans “Remigration” Office Linked to Racist Far-Right Plan. By Malcolm Ferguson / TNR
Joy Reid Is Back and Bolder Than Ever with a New Podcast That Pulls No Punches. By Poligirlsayswhat / Baller Alert
Award-Winning Journalist Joy Reid Brings Her Signature Insight and Bold Voice to New Three-Times-a-Week Podcast
Exploring the gulf between Martin Luther King Jr. and Donald Trump in divided nation. By Savannah Kuchar / USA Today
“If President Kennedy and Medgar Evers and Malcolm X, Dad and Robert Kennedy had lived, we would be on a totally different trajectory,” King said. “These were people who were all cut down at a very critical time, not just in our nation, but in terms of where they were moving toward.”
“By and large, in our nation, there is a goodness, a righteousness, a desire to care about our fellow human being,” King said. “We’re on a course that appears to be temporarily out of kilter. We must, at some point, make a course correction.” Read more
One Thing Still Unites Republicans. By Jamelle Bouie / NYT
With each new Republican administration, it is the same promise. With each round of tax cuts, it is the same result: vast benefits for the wealthiest Americans and a pittance for everyone else. There is little growth but widening inequality and an even starker gap between the haves and have-nots.
We are now looking at another round of Republican tax cuts. Yet again the claim is that this will benefit most Americans. “The next phase of our plan to deliver the greatest economy in history is for this Congress to pass tax cuts for everybody,” Trump said in his March 4 address to Congress. But as Paul Krugman points out in his Substack newsletter, this latest package is both a shameless giveaway to the rich and a ruinous cut to safety net programs for lower-income and working Americans. Read more
Education
Trump’s Attacks Threaten Much More Than Harvard. By Greg Lukianoff / The Atlantic
If the government succeeds in bullying the richest university into submission, what institutions will be safe?
On May 22, the Department of Homeland Security stripped Harvard University of its Student and Exchange Visitor Program certification, instantly jeopardizing the visas of nearly 6,800 international students—27 percent of the student body. The administration’s attack on academic freedom will not end with Harvard. Noem has already said that this should “serve as a warning to all universities and academic institutions.” Read more
Related: Trump and Harvard: The US is squandering a major advantage. By Bryan Walsh / Vox
Marco Rubio Is Attacking American Education. International Students Are His Pawns. By Natasha Lennard / The Intercept
The Trump administration doesn’t want a protectionist college system. They want a destroyed one.
On the same day that a federal judge deemed Secretary of State Marco Rubio’s attempt to deport Mahmoud Khalil on alleged “foreign policy” grounds likely unconstitutional, Rubio announced in a gnomic statement that the Trump administration will “aggressively revoke” visas of Chinese students, including those with “ties to the Chinese Communist Party” or who are studying in “critical fields.” Read more
A Scholarship for Black Medical Students Honored His Father’s Legacy. The University Canceled It. Katherine Mangan / Chronicle of Higher Ed.
In 2013, the family of Herschell Lee Hamilton established an annual scholarship at the University of Alabama at Birmingham to support high-achieving, financially needy Black students who had been accepted to the university’s medical school. On April 11, the university pulled the plug on the scholarship and sent the money back. Herschell Lanier Hamilton poses with a picture of his father, Herschell Lee Hamilton (right).
The university faced the prospect of losing federal funds after the Trump administration warned in a February “Dear Colleague” letter that race-conscious scholarships were discriminatory and illegal. UAB is among several universities the Education Department specifically targeted for investigation. Read more
World
Does Donald Trump want to carve up the world — or keep it all for himself? By Andrew O’Hehir / Salon
Trump was over the moon about meeting Kim Jong-un during his first term, and still thinks that went well. He transparently believes he’d have gotten along smashingly with Hitler and Stalin.
Trump would neither know nor care that, considered as a whole, the “Great Game” of the 19th century probably produced the greatest set of crimes in human history, or that the migrant crisis amounts to its long-tail karmic blowback. Read more
Related: The Trump Presidency’s World-Historical Heist. By David Frum / The Atlantic
The Remains of Segregation and Apartheid in South Africa. By Garrett Freas / AAIHS
In Apartheid Remains, geographer and interdisciplinary scholar Sharad Chari deftly navigates the sedimented terrain of twentieth-century South African apartheid and its resonances in the early twenty-first century. A large statue of former South African president Nelson Mandela stands 9 meters tall in the middle of the Union Buildings in Pretoria.
The book focuses on the experiences and struggles of living with the reality and remains of apartheid for Black, Indian, and multiracial working-class South Africans in the industrial Indian Ocean City of Durban, on the east coast of South Africa. Read more
In Emaciated Children, Gaza’s Hunger Is Laid Bare. By Vivian Yee / NYT
The starvation of Gaza can be measured in the jutting ribs of a 6-year-old girl. In the twig-like thinness of her arms. In the pounds she and those around her have lost. In the two tomatoes, two green chili peppers and single cucumber a destitute child can buy to feed his family that day.
Until last week, Israel had blocked all food, fuel and medicine from entering the Gaza Strip for 80 days, attempting to pressure Hamas into releasing the Israeli hostages it still holds as negotiations over a cease-fire remain deadlocked. Read more
Elon Musk’s Legacy Is Disease, Starvation and Death. By Michelle Goldberg / NYT
There is an Elon Musk post on X, his social media platform, that should define his legacy. “We spent the weekend feeding USAID into the wood chipper,” he wrote on Feb. 3. He could have “gone to some great parties. Did that instead.”
Though a rump operation is operating inside the State Department, the administration says that it has terminated more than 80 percent of U.S.A.I.D. grants. Brooke Nichols, an associate professor of global health at Boston University, has estimated that these cuts have already resulted in about 300,000 deaths, most of them of children, and will most likely lead to significantly more by the end of the year. That is what Musk’s foray into politics accomplished. Read more
Related: Really, Secretary Rubio? I’m Lying About the Kids Dying Under Trump? By Nicholas Kristof / NYT
Ethics / Morality / Religion
An interfaith group’s 1950s MLK comic book remains a prominent nonviolence teaching tool. By Adelle M. Banks / RNS
You have done a marvelous job of grasping the underlying truth and philosophy of the movement,’ the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. wrote to the creator of a comic book about civil rights.
At cross-cultural gatherings in Bethlehem, West Bank, groups of children and adults turn to a 67-year-old, colorful comic book with the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.’s image on its cover, his tie and shirt collar visible beneath his clerical robe. As they read from “Martin Luther King and the Montgomery Story,” the group leader is prepared to discuss questions about achieving peace through nonviolent behavior. Read more
I’m Normally a Mild Guy. Here’s What’s Pushed Me Over the Edge. By David Brooks / NYT
Elite snobbery has a tendency to set me off, and here are two guys with advanced degrees telling us that regular soldiers never fight partly out of some sense of moral purpose, some commitment to a larger cause — the men who froze at Valley Forge, the men who stormed the beaches at Normandy and Guadalcanal.
What really made me angry was that these little statements point to the moral rot at the core of Trumpism, which every day disgraces our country, which we are proud of and love. Trumpism can be seen as a giant attempt to amputate the highest aspirations of the human spirit and to reduce us to our most primitive, atavistic tendencies. Read more
In a reversal, Trump bashes Catholic conservative activist Leonard Leo. By Allison Prang / NCR
President Donald Trump lambasted prominent conservative mega donor and Catholic, Leonard Leo, calling him a “sleazebag” and accusing Leo’s Federalist Society of giving him “bad advice” on some judicial nominations.
Trump’s comments disparaging some of his judicial nominees come during what has been a legally explosive few months for his second administration, with many of its actions being challenged in court. Read more
Historical / Cultural
Skulls of 19 Black Americans Return to New Orleans After 150 Years in Germany. Aishvarya Kavi / NYT
The remains, used in the 19th century as part of now discredited racial science, are being laid to rest on Saturday in a traditional jazz funeral. Mayor LaToya Cantrell of New Orleans carries the remains of one of 19 Black men that were returned to the city.
While the return of human remains from museum collections has become more common, the repatriation of these 19 Black cranial remains to New Orleans is believed to be the first major international restitution of the remains of Black Americans from Europe, according to Paul Wolff Mitchell, a researcher at the University of Amsterdam who studies the 19th century history of race and science in the United States and Europe. Read more
Woman Wins Legal Battle With Harvard Over Ancestor’s Slave Photos. By Tom Sanders / The Daily Beast
The university is handing pictures taken during a vile pseudoscience “study” in 1850 over to a South Carolina Museum.
A woman has emerged victorious from a lengthy legal battle with Harvard over possession of two images of an enslaved father and daughter who she believes are her descendants. The daguerreotypes, believed to have been taken by a Harvard professor in 1850 as part of discredited study into Black racial “inferiority,” will be delivered along with images of five other enslaved people to the the International African American Museum in Charleston, South Carolina, the state where the individuals were enslaved. Read more
What Made Nat King Cole, and These 5 Songs, Unforgettable. By Alan Light / NYT
Colman Domingo and Patricia McGregor’s play “Lights Out” explores the beloved yet complicated performer who was subtly “advancing who we are as Americans.”
In November 1956, Nat King Cole was given his own variety show on NBC. It drew major guest stars and got good ratings, but was abandoned just over a year later because it couldn’t secure a single national sponsor; brands were too nervous about boycotts from racist viewers. Read more
Sports
Mike Tyson “Should Be Dead Many Times Over”: Why the World Hasn’t Knocked Out the Champ. By Tom Kludt / Vanity Fair
In his new book, Baddest Man, sportswriter Mark Kriegel charts the boxing phenom’s path from hardscrabble Brooklyn streets to the heights of 1980s glitz and glamour, where everyone from HBO execs to Donald Trump wanted a piece of the action.
There is a Tyson for every generation; the one introduced to millennials like me was less imposing in the ring and more erratic outside of it. For later generations, maybe they know the Tyson who made a cameo in The Hangover, or the one who squared off with Jake Paul on Netflix. Read more
Women’s College World Series: These Black softball standouts are players to watch. By Cayla Sweazie / Andscape
The top eight teams in college softball are heading to Oklahoma City this week to compete for a national championship in the Women’s College World Series (WCWS). There are multiple storylines to follow, from Oklahoma seeking its fifth consecutive national championship to Texas Tech playing in the WCWS for the first time.
Here are several Black softball standouts to follow during the Women’s College World Series, which begins Thursday. All game times are in Eastern (ET). Read more
My front row seat on ‘Inside the NBA,’ the greatest studio show in sports TV history. By David Aldridge / NYT
In Techwood’s Studio J, from where TNT’s “Inside” was broadcast, Charles Barkley and Kenny Smith and, later, Shaquille O’Neal were the stars, along with the best studio host of all time, Ernie Johnson.
If you were on the set with them, you were, as far as everyone on set was concerned, their equal. If you thought they were wrong about something, you were allowed – you were expected – to challenge them. Just because they were former players, and great ones, didn’t mean your opinion didn’t count. But, it had to be genuine, not forced, canned “debate.” Read more
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