Featured
Why the right is so terrified of “woke”: There are truths it just can’t face. By Kirk Swearingen / Salon
Conservatives didn’t want to hear about white privilege. So they abandoned reality and joined the orange man’s cult. Florida Republican Governor Ron DeSantis addresses attendees on day one of the 2022 Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) in Orlando. (Paul Hennessy/SOPA Images/LightRocket via Getty Images)
Long ago and far away in a country where we all seemed to believe in roughly the same reality, many people in a political party that traditionally talked up law and order and guffawed that liberals needed to put on their “big-boy pants” to face the harsh facts of the world lost their minds. How did this happen? Well, they were reminded that there was such a thing as white privilege. They had forgotten about it, possibly on purpose.
In the centuries since the notion of “whiteness” was created, poor and working-class white men and women learned the importance of rejecting the truth about white privilege. Wilkerson quotes Yale scholar Liston Pope in 1942, writing: “The mill worker with nobody else to ‘look down on,’ regards himself as eminently superior to the Negro.” Or as Lyndon Johnson famously remarked to Bill Moyers, “If you can convince the lowest white man he’s better than the best colored man, he won’t notice you’re picking his pocket. Hell, give him somebody to look down on, and he’ll empty his pockets for you.” Read more
Political / Social
Ron DeSantis is campaigning on his record. Judges keep saying it’s unconstitutional. By Steve Contorno / CNN
Gov. Ron DeSantis has toured the country calling Florida the place “where woke goes to die.”
DeSantis tried to ban DEI employee training in 2022, when the Florida Republican championed what he called the Stop WOKE Act. But Honeyfund and others sued on the grounds that the law violated their free speech. A federal judge agreed and blocked it from going into effect. “Companies aren’t ‘going woke’ out of allegiance to Democrats. Time after time, diversity has proven to be good for the bottom line,” Margulis said. “Valuing diversity means understanding it, understanding means training and training means having to deal with this law. We were really handed a chance to make a difference for other business owners by challenging it, and we took it.” In his early outreach to Republican voters as a presidential candidate, DeSantis has portrayed himself as a fighter and, crucially, a winner in the cultural battles increasingly important to conservatives. If elected to the White House, he’ll take those fights to Washington, he has said. Read more
Donald Trump Sinks to a New Low by Dog-Whistling an Old Racist Tune. By David Margolick / The Nation
You’ve got to be taught: Donald Trump has retained every lesson he learned from his bigoted father, Fred Trump. (Dennis Caruso / NY Daily News Archive via Getty Images)
“This lunatic special prosecutor named Jack Smith—I wonder what it was prior to a change?” Trump said that night. (The emphasis is mine.) He then paused for a moment, as if to let the cognoscenti savor his little aside, and a smattering of knowing, sinister laughter rippled across the room. At least a few people seemed to catch his drift. A little bit of history—America’s and Trump’s—makes things considerably less mysterious. Any Jew of a certain age recognizes Trump’s trope as a classic anti-Semitic slur, one dating back to Henry Ford and probably before. Read more
Related: Faith in Trump dominates annual gathering of religious conservatives. By Matt Dixon / NBC News
Nikki Haley and Tim Scott are pushing away Black voters like me. By Sophia A. Nelson / CNN
Sophia A. Nelson is a journalist, former congressional committee investigative counsel and author of the book “ePluribus One.”
It’s rare that former presidents wade this early into presidential campaign politics, but former President Barack Obama has done just that, chiding two Republican presidential candidates for downplaying America’s miserable history on race. Nikki Haley and Tim Scott have been complaining loudly about it ever since. But their way of looking at race, Obama said, fails to address “crippling generational poverty that is a consequence of hundreds of years of racism in this society – and we need to do something about that,” he said. Read more
Blame the Supreme Court for America’s Decade of Voter Disenfranchisement. By Ari Berman / Mother Jones
In 1965, the monumental Voting Rights Act passed, striking down the suppressive devices that prevented African-Americans from voting in the South for so many years. At the time, one in four North Carolinians were Black but there wasn’t a single Black member in the state legislature.
The main reason that Republicans were able to target Black representation so ruthlessly was because of Shelby County v. Holder, a 2013 Supreme Court ruling holding that states with a long history of discrimination no longer needed to approve voting changes and electoral maps with the federal government—a process known as “preclearance.” Read more
Wealth Is the Third Rail of American Politics. Let’s Grab It. By Ezra Klein / NYT Podcast
The economist Derrick Hamilton discusses how policy proposal like “baby bonds” could help the country move toward greater racial and economic equity
“Wealth is the paramount indicator of economic prosperity and well-being,” says the economist Darrick Hamilton. He’s right. Policy analysis tends to focus on income, but it is wealth that often determines whether we can send our kids to college, pay for an illness, quit a job, start a business or make a down payment on a home. Wealth is also the source of some of our deepest social inequalities: The top 10 percent of households in the U.S. own about 70 percent of the nation’s wealth, and the typical Black family has about one-tenth the wealth of the typical white family. Listen here
Related: The Banking System Is Still Stacked Against Black Business Owners. By Sage Howard / HuffPost
Black veterans are denied VA health benefits more often than white veterans, new data shows. By Courtney Kube / NBC News
The VA has launched a new initiative to determine why benefits are doled out at different rates and try to level the playing field for Blacks, women and LGBTQ+ veterans.
In fiscal year 2023, 84.8% of all Black veterans who applied for physical or mental health benefits were given assistance by the VA, compared to 89.4% of their white counterparts who applied. The VA data includes information dating back to fiscal year 2017, which shows that white veterans have had a higher grant rate than their Black counterparts every year. Read more
Hispanics, Asians drove post-pandemic U.S. population growth, data shows. By Tara Bahrampour / Wash Post
Much of the increase is due to an increase in net immigration, Brookings Institution demographer William Frey said
An analysis by William Frey, a senior demographer at the Brookings Institution, showed the White population declining by 668,418 people, compared with a record decline of 809,784 people the previous year. The Hispanic population grew by 1.04 million, compared with 786,622 the year before. Asians and Pacific Islanders increased by 475,679, compared with 240,191 the previous year, and Black people increased by 211,193 compared with 121,787 the year before. Read more
Related: Latinos now outnumber non-Hispanic whites in Texas, census data shows. By
She didn’t expect to get melanoma. Why Black people need sunscreen. By Amudalat Ajasa and Teddy Amenabar / Wash Post
People with darker skin complexions are at a lower risk of developing skin cancer due to sun exposure. But the risk is not zero, many dermatologists say.
In 2019, the American Academy of Dermatology formed a working group of experts to examine the existing research for sunscreen and skin cancer in people of color. Amy McMichael, a professor of dermatology at Wake Forest University School of Medicine, who leads the group, said the new recommendations, expected soon, will include advice that people with darker complexions use tinted mineral sunscreen with an SPF, or sun protection factor, of 30. Read more
Ethics / Morality / Religion
To quell racism, tell more stories that welcome the stranger. By
Our shared experience leads us to know what it’s like to be singled out based on what others think they know. Many factors contribute to these societal stereotypes, and the media we consume often plays an outsized role in shaping our biases.
The promise of connecting across our differences comes alive in Josh’s Oscar-nominated documentary, “Stranger at the Gate.” The film tells the story of a former U.S. Marine planning to blow up a small Islamic community center in Indiana — and the Muslim community members who changed his mind. Bibi Bahrami, the community member who first welcomed the veteran, notes that while not every story about welcoming the stranger ends well, the hope of a real relationship founded on shared understanding compels her to reach out continually. Read more
Related: He walked away from his evangelical roots to escape feeling suffocated. By Rachel Martin / NPR
The Largest and Fastest Religious Shift in America Is Well Underway. By Jessica Grose / NYT
In their new book “The Great Dechurching: Who’s Leaving, Why Are They Going and What Will It Take to Bring Them Back?” Jim Davis and Michael Graham with Ryan Burge argue that the most dramatic change may be in regular attendance at houses of worship.
“We are currently in the middle of the largest and fastest religious shift in the history of our country,” they postulate, because “about 15 percent of American adults living today (around 40 million people) have effectively stopped going to church, and most of this dechurching has happened in the past 25 years.” Read more
Antisemitic hate crimes’ rise seen firsthand at Rutgers, US colleges. By Deena Yellin / USA Today
Tracking a surge in antisemitism across the culture, U.S. colleges and universities have seen a rapid rise in anti-Jewish activity, according to government agencies and private watchdogs that track bias incidents. In April, the Anti-Defamation League said such reports had spiked by 41% in 2022 compared with the previous year, with incidents recorded at more than 130 schools.
In more than three dozen recent interviews with NorthJersey.com, a member of the USA TODAY Network, Jewish students shared stories of harassment that bring those statistics to disturbing life. They spoke of slurs endured in class, expulsions from campus clubs, and eggs thrown at Jewish fraternities. Of swastikas carved into their dorm walls, Holocaust-denying flyers and a growing feeling that they needed to conceal their Jewish identities to be accepted. Read more
Inside the Black church fighting for reparations from California. By Scott Wilson / Wash Post
Through one historic Black church, the struggle for acknowledgment and now recompense can be traced back decades. The Rev. Amos C. Brown speaks to congregants after conducting a Sunday service at the Third Baptist Church in San Francisco on June 4. (Melina Mara/The Washington Post)
California’s two-year review of what it owes Black residents for decades of state-sanctioned discrimination is reaching a decisive phase, and whatever form of reparation that emerges will set a national precedent.At a church that’s nearly as old as the state, expectations among Black Californians for recompense remain high, and Brown, who is vice chairman of the first-of-its-kind state reparations task force, has kept them that way. Read more
Mother Mary Lange, founder of first African American religious congregation, declared venerable. By Hannah Brockhaus / CNA
Pope Francis has advanced the sainthood cause of Mother Mary Elizabeth Lange, a Black religious sister who founded the country’s first African American religious congregation in Baltimore in 1829.
The recognition of Lange’s heroic virtue and the advancement of her cause from servant of God to venerable was announced by the Vatican in a decree signed on June 22. The Church will now need to approve a miracle attributed to her intercession before she can be beatified. Elizabeth Lange, as she was named, immigrated to the United States from Cuba in the early 1800s. Recognizing the lack of education for the children of her fellow Black immigrants, with a friend she established St. Frances Academy in her own home and with her own money to offer free schooling to Baltimore’s African American children. Read more
Historical / Cultural
How ex-Confederates spread racist attitudes far and wide after the Civil War. By Curtis Bunn / NBC News
The “Confederate Diaspora” has contributed to systemic racism in almost every area of life, and it continues shape “racial inequities in labor, housing, and policing,” researchers wrote.
A new study outlines how white people’s migration during and after the Civil War, from the Confederate South to the West, bolstered white supremacy and institutional racism in non-slave states, helping create the vast racial disparities that exist today nationwide. Five researchers from separate colleges collaborated on the study, called “Confederate Diaspora,” to compile and study census data that tracked the migration to the West of white Americans, including 60,000 former plantation owners. The former Southerners took on local positions of authority, like police officers, clergy and politicians, giving them influence to create a post-Civil War culture that continued to oppress Black people even after slavery had ended. Read more
In Charleston, a Museum Honors a Journey of Grief and Grace. By Holland Cotter / NYT
The International African American Museum, in a former slave port, is about more than slavery. It’s about survival and resilience.
In Charleston Harbor, where the initiating shots of the Civil War were fired — Fort Sumter is distantly visible — I’m on the site of a former shipping pier known as Gadsden’s Wharf. Here, in the 18th and early 19th centuries, ships carrying tens of thousands of enslaved Africans deposited their human cargo, a population that would, through unthinkable adversity and creative perseverance, utterly transform what “America” meant, and means. On this spot now, looking a bit like a ship itself, stands the eagerly awaited and long-delayed new International African American Museum. Read more
‘Let the world know’: elderly survivors of the Tulsa race massacre push for justice. By David Smith / The Guardian
Viola Ford Fletcher and her family fled a murderous white mob 102 years ago – today she’s still demanding accountability
Viola Ford Fletcher smiles as her mind burrows back in time more than a hundred years. “We were happy then,” she says wistfully. “Before this happened, we had children in the neighbourhood to play with. We had schools, churches, hospitals, theatres and anything that people enjoyed. It was a strong community.” “This” refers to the 1921 Tulsa race massacre, when a white mob descended on the neighbourhood of Greenwood, home to a business district known as Black Wall Street, killing an estimated 300 people and looting and burning businesses and homes. Thousands were left homeless and living in a hastily constructed internment camp. Now Fletcher is thought to have become the world’s oldest author with Don’t Let Them Bury My Story, a memoir that recounts the impact of the massacre on her life and advocates for racial justice. “I’ve enjoyed life so far, so I think if I can do it at this time, I should,” she says. Read more
Detroit, NAACP unveil MLK statue on 60th anniversary of “I Have a Dream” speech in Detroit. By Raymond Strickland / CBS News
Sixty years ago Friday, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. delivered his “I Have a Dream” speech for the first time in downtown Detroit.
Now, the city is honoring the civil rights icon with a statue in Hart Plaza. The Walk to Freedom march took place on June 23, 1963, in Detroit, as more than 125,000 people walked down Woodward Avenue. “The ‘I Have a Dream’ just had everybody on their feet. I was a little child trying to see,” said Derek Blackmon. Blackmon was a part of the march and was inside Cobo Hall when King delivered the speech. Read more
Black Music Sunday: Let’s celebrate Justice Sotomayor’s birthday with some New York City salsa. By Denise Oliver Velez / Daily Kos
Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor waves to the crowd after dancing salsa with actor Esai Morales at The National Hispanic Foundation for the Arts (NHFA) annual gala in 2009.
Sunday is Justice Sotomayor’s birthday: She was born on June 25, 1954, in The Bronx, New York City. It’s a city which is also home to a wide array of Afro Latin music and musicians. I’ve followed her career for years, read her biography, and know that she is a jazz fan. But she also dances salsa! With that in mind, let’s listen (and dance) to some of the music she grew up with, and to a piece of music created in her honor! Listen here
Queen Latifah, Dionne Warwick chosen for Kennedy Center Honors. By AP and Andscape
Two musical giants – Queen Latifah and Dionne Warwick – were among the five iconic artists selected for this year’s Kennedy Center Honors.
The others selected for the lifetime artistic achievement award are comic Billy Crystal, opera singer Renée Fleming, and 1970s music icon Barry Gibb. All will be honored with the traditional gala celebration at Washington’s Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts on Dec. 3. Read more
Tyler Perry Reportedly Objects to $3B Asking Price For BET. By Ny MaGee / Eurweb News
*Tyler Perry is reportedly the frontrunner in an upcoming auction to buy Black Entertainment Television (BET).
Perry, however, is said to be unwilling to pay the $3 billion asking price, according to the Daily Mail. We reported previously that Perry and Byron Allen are interested in buying BET as Paramount Global explores a potential sale of the asset which includes BET, VH1, and the BET+ streaming service. Read more
Sports
Ja Morant shows how a ‘good guy with a gun’ can never be Black. A. Joseph Dial / The Conversation
On March 4, 2023, Morant posted an Instagram Live video of him displaying a gun at a Denver strip club. Colorado is an open carry state, but it’s illegal to carry a firearm while under the influence of alcohol. Though Morant was never charged for a crime, the NBA suspended him eight games for “conduct detrimental to the league.” Then, on May 14, 2023, another Instagram Live video surfaced of Morant holding a gun in a parked car with his friends while dancing to rap music. In response, the NBA suspended Morant for 25 games to start this upcoming season for “engaging in reckless and irresponsible behavior with guns.”
I’m not looking to defend Morant’s behavior. It was careless, and he could have harmed himself and others. But as a scholar of Black popular culture, I can’t help but wonder what the reaction would have been if Morant were white. Read more
Why Eagles LB Nakobe Dean is an ‘NFL unicorn’ determined to finish his college degree. By Zach Berman / The Atheletic
Nakobe Dean waited only eight days after the Philadelphia Eagles lost Super Bowl LVII before he sat in a 30-person fluid mechanics class at the University of Georgia. He transitioned from a rookie season that stretched a month longer than most of his peers’ by taking a course on heat transfer. Dean would have been an impressive student in his own right — he had a 3.55 GPA before leaving school — but he also happened to be the best linebacker in college football as a junior in 2021. He left Georgia early and was selected by the Eagles in the third round of the 2022 NFL Draft. Dean was mostly a special teams contributor as a rookie. But he’s expected to be the Eagles’ top linebacker in 2023, and the team (and Dean) is planning accordingly. Read more
Ron DeSantis pushes racist tropes in latest comments about basketball and baseball players. By Mike Freeman / USA Today
DeSantis did an interview with the Christian Broadcasting Network and one of the topics was baseball. The interviewer called it a “thinking man’s game” (another dog whistle/bullhorn/stadium speaker) then asked the Florida governor and presidential hopeful his thoughts on the sport.
“So I think that there’s kind of a place for everybody on a baseball team if you’re willing to work hard, if you’re willing to practice, and if you’re willing to hone your skills,” DeSantis said. “I kind of thought it was always a very democratic game, a very meritocratic game. “Whereas I kind of viewed like basketball as like these guys are just freaks of nature. They’re just incredible athletes. In baseball, you know, you have some guys that might not necessarily be the best athletes, but maybe they’ve got you know that slider that nobody can hit, or they have the skills that allow them to compete at the highest level.” Read more
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