Featured
There will be no gun control: For many white Americans, the idea of the gun is all they have left. By Chris Hedges / Salon
White Americans cling to the gun as a symbol of strength and independence. They see its loss as a final, fatal blow
White people built their supremacy in America and globally with violence. They massacred Native Americans and stole their land. They kidnapped Africans, shipped them as cargo to the Americas, and then enslaved, lynched, imprisoned and impoverished Black people for generations. They have always gunned down Black people with impunity, a historical reality only recently discernible to most white people because of cell phone videos of killings. “The essential American soul is hard, isolate, stoic and a killer,” D.H. Lawrence writes. “It has never yet melted.”
White society, sometimes overtly and sometimes unconsciously, deeply fears Black retribution for its four centuries of murderous assaults. Read more
Related: White supremacist attacks stir GOP fears for safety of White people. By Dana Milbank / Wash Post
Related: Feds Warn Of Increased Domestic Extremist Threat As Midterms Approach. By Ben Fox / HuffPost
Political / Social
Buffalo victim’s son pleads with senators to address domestic terrorism. By Melissa Quinn / CBS News
The former commissioner of the Buffalo Fire Department whose 86-year-old mother was fatally shot at a grocery store in Buffalo, New York, last month, pressured senators to address the rising threat of domestic terrorism, asking if there is “nothing that you personally are willing to do” to stop the spread of extremist ideology at the root of numerous violent attacks in recent years. “You expect us to continue to just forgive and forget over and over again. And what are you doing?” asked Garnell Whitfield Jr., whose mother, Ruth Whitfield, was among the 10 people shot and killed in the attack at Tops Friendly Market in Buffalo on May 14. “You’re elected to protect us, to protect our way of life. I ask every one of you to imagine the faces of your mothers as you look at mine and ask yourself, is there nothing that we can do?” Read more
Related: Why Black people are afraid of ‘crazy’ White people. By Jonathan Capehart / Wash Post
Karen Bass has chance to make history in Los Angeles mayoral race. By Shawna Mizelle /CNN
US Rep. Karen Bass, a longtime Democratic lawmaker who was on President Joe Biden’s short list for a running mate during the 2020 campaign, could make history in California. The Los Angeles mayor’s race has pitted Bass against real estate developer Rick Caruso in a runoff to replace term-limited Mayor Eric Garcetti, CNN projects. If elected, Bass would become the first woman and the first Black woman to lead America’s second-largest city. Read more
Judge rejects Louisiana congressional map with only one Black district. By AP and NBC News
A federal judge on Monday blocked the use of newly drawn congressional maps in Louisiana that include only one mostly Black district, and she ordered the Legislature to come up with a remedial plan by June 20. State officials swiftly filed a notice of appeal of the order by U.S. District Judge Shelly Dick in Baton Rouge. Dick’s June 20 deadline for drawing new district lines is one month before the signup period for the Nov. 8 congressional election. Read more
Lightfoot splashes into crowded Chicago mayoral field with reelection launch. By Shia Kapos / Politico
Mayor Lori Lightfoot officially announced her bid for a second term on Tuesday, confirming the worst-kept secret in town. The first-term Democratic mayor is pinning her 2023 reelection hopes on her record managing the Covid-19 pandemic, pushing a tough-on-crime message in neighborhoods struggling with violence, and embracing a brand of withering honesty she’s wagered Chicagoans respect. She’s also championed a recent $15 minimum wage, created the city’s first civilian-led police oversight panel, and backed affordable housing and guaranteed income projects. Read more
Karine Jean-Pierre: New White House press secretary a gay role model. By Michael Collins / USA Today
Jean-Pierre, who last month became the first openly gay person and first woman of color to become the top White House spokesperson, shares the story of her painful coming out to drive home a larger point for other young people who identify as LGBTQ but are too scared to live openly or whose own lives may be filled with trauma and angst. Life does get better. She’s living proof. Not only is she riding high professionally, “my mom loves my partner, my mom loves my kid, and my mom loves me – and has always loved me – but she loves everything about me now,” Jean-Pierre said from her West Wing office. Read more
Moms for Liberty Has Created Nightmares for Schools Across the Country. Laura Jedeed / TNR
The group of parents has injected conservative politics into classrooms and reshaped the 2022 midterms.
Initial skepticism at the replacement of To Kill a Mockingbird with Bryan Stevenson’s Just Mercy turned to full-scale alarm as she listened to the way the teacher taught the book. “There was so much commentary … and it was clearly one-sided. ‘Our entire system is broken. It needs to be burned down.’” Wasn’t this supposed to be a writing class? Who put all these politics here? “The deciding factor for us,” Brandy said, “was when my daughter came home and said, ‘Mom, I never used to think about it, but now I see somebody with black skin and brown skin, and I’m afraid they’re going to hate me because I have white skin.’” Brandy pulled her daughter out of school to teach her at home. Her son still attends public high school. Read more
$3 Million Settlement Reached In Lawsuit Over Black Man’s Death. By Tom Foreman Jr. / HuffPost
The family of Andrew Brown Jr. had filed a $30 million civil rights lawsuit in 2021, saying the man died because officers showed “intentional and reckless disregard of his life.”
Brown was killed on April 21 of last year by Pasquotank County sheriff’s deputies while they were serving drug-related warrants at his Elizabeth City home. Several deputies surrounded Brown in his BMW before his car backed up and moved forward. They fired several shots at and into his vehicle. He was killed by a bullet to the back of his head. The settlement was approved by the Pasquotank County Board of Commissioners. It includes a special $1 million appropriation to go along with $2 million from the county’s insurance policy, which was supplied by the North Carolina Counties Liabilities Pool, according to a statement from the sheriff’s office provided to The Associated Press. That amount is at the limit of the policy. Read more
Racial minorities have higher death rates from cancer than white patients, study shows. By Mary Kekatos and Dr. Priya Jaisinghani / ABC News
Mortality rates for multiple myeloma were twice as high for Black patients.
Racial and ethnic minorities in the United States continue to be disproportionately burdened by cancer, a new report suggests. Published by the American Association for Cancer Research on Wednesday, the report found that Black, Hispanic, Asian and Indigenous patients are more likely to be diagnosed with cancer and die from the disease compared to white patients despite overall rates of cancer incidence and mortality declining. Read more
Ethics / Morality / Religion
So who are “evangelicals”? And how did they become such massive hypocrites? By Nathaniel Manderson / Salon
As a true believer in an Invisible Guy in the Sky, I’m here to explain how evangelicals became enemies of Jesus
Who are these evangelicals? First off, their true ancestors are the Pharisees of the New Testament, whom Jesus describes as being obsessed with legalistic questions but neglecting “the more important matters of the law — justice, mercy and faithfulness.” This is the primary group that had Jesus killed. Much like the Pharisees, today’s American evangelicals do not represent the faith in any genuine way. They have done more damage to the name of Christianity than any group I can think of. Their misuse of the Christian faith as a political weapon against anyone they see as an enemy is driven primarily by greed and a thirst for power. Read more
An interview with Cornel West on American pragmatism. Sean Illing / Vox
Pragmatism is America’s homegrown philosophical tradition. Its lessons are as urgent as ever.
Cornel West is one of the most unique philosophical voices in America. He has written a ton of books and taught for over 40 years at schools like Princeton, Harvard, and now at the Union Theological Seminary. West is what I’d call a public-facing philosopher, which is to say he’s not a cloistered academic. He’s constantly engaging the public and his thought is always in dialogue with poetry and music and literature. (If you’ve ever seen one of his lectures, you know what I mean.) For West, pragmatism is really the philosophy of democracy; it’s a way of knowing and doing that puts the average human being at the center. So I reached out to West for a recent episode of Vox Conversations to talk about the story of American pragmatism, how his views are shaped by his devotion to the blues and his Christian faith, and how pragmatism can revitalize our approach to democracy today. Read more
Second Amendment: Has the gun become a sacred object in America? By Patrik Jonsson and Noah Robertson / CSM
In the decade since the mass shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary in Newtown, Connecticut, that perspective has helped drive the guns debate toward an almost religious tone – that of a battle between good and evil that goes well beyond good or bad policy. For a small group of Americans and religious leaders, the more access to firearms has become a moral question, the more defending them has become a righteous cause in defense of the freedom to protect America’s virtues. “People don’t actually think that the rifle is sacred, but what the rifle stands for is sacred,” says Wake Forest University sociologist David Yamane, author of “Concealed Carry Revolution.” “When they look at their gun they see freedom, independence, and the righteousness of God in allowing America to be what it is.” Read more
Historical / Cultural
Should We Judge Thomas Jefferson by His Ideals or His Actions? By Daniel N. Gullotta / Christianity Today
A new biography maps out the moral tensions that tormented his mind and tainted his legacy.
Much of this controversy stems from Jefferson’s dual identity as the author of the Declaration of Independence and his status as one of the nation’s most prominent slaveholders. Add to this the unsettling reality that Jefferson fathered at least six children with an enslaved woman, Sally Hemings, and it’s little wonder that many Americans find themselves wondering how such a man could have penned the words “All men are created equal.” With the 250th anniversary of the American Revolution looming, it is difficult to predict if and how Jefferson’s name will be invoked. Read more
Searching for Anna Douglass in the Archives. By Daina Ramey Berry /AAIHS
Collage of Anna Murray Douglass (ca 1860) and Frederick Douglass (ca 1850 – 1890). (Courtesy of the LOC and Wikimedia Commons)
Most people know her as the first wife of the most famous African American leader of the 19th century. Her daughter Rosetta Sprague provides the most convincing description, reminding readers that her mother’s identity was so immersed with her fathers, that few people truly understood or “appreciated the full value of the woman who presided over the Douglass home for forty-four years.” But she also noted how hard it is to talk about her mother “without mention of father” because “Her life was so enveloped in his.” As a result, much of what is known about her has been shared through his life. Read more
A new quarter honors Native American leader and activist Wilma Mankiller. By Tekella Foster / NPR
Some coin enthusiasts will be able to add a quarter dedicated to the first female principal chief of the Cherokee Nation to their collections on Monday. The Wilma Mankiller quarter is the third coin released under a U.S. Mint program celebrating the achievement of diverse prominent women in American history. Mankiller led the Cherokee Nation from 1985 to 1995 and is credited with boosting tribal enrollment and employment and reforming the tribe’s programs for health, children and housing. Read more
Why Can’t the Star Wars Nerds Imagine a World With Black People? By Arianna Coghill / Mother Jones
It’s like clockwork. A harvesting of Star Wars IP is announced; a cast list is released; a horde of fans abuse an actor of color for daring to be in the franchise. This time the racists crawled out of their hidey holes and took to social media to abuse actress Moses Ingram. Ingram faced the barrage after it was revealed she would play “Reva” in the new Obi Wan Kenobi mini-series. People called her a “diversity hire,” the N-word, and a slew of other race-based insults. Some even threatened her life. Read more
The 200 Greatest Hip-Hop Albums of All Time By Charles et al / Rolling Stone
These are the albums that have defined hip-hop history — from Run-DMC to Playboi Carti, from G-funk to drill, from the Bronx to Houston, and beyond
Two hundred seems like an almost luxuriantly expansive number when you’re making an albums list, and in any other genre, maybe it would be. But the history of rap LPs is so rich and varied, we were forced to make some painful choices — there are so many iconic artists with deep catalogs, so many constantly evolving sounds and regional scenes. That’s one reason we limited our scope to English language hip-hop. Relatedly, a list of hip-hop-adjacent albums from the worlds of dancehall or reggaeton or grime would be fun and fascinating, and something for us to revisit down the road. Read more
Oprah’s Book Club selects “Nightcrawling” by teen novelist Leila Mottley. By Tori B. Powell / CBS News
Author Leila Mottley, 19, says she thought she was joining a Zoom call with her editor and publicist to discuss the publication date of her new novel, “Nightcrawling.” Little did she know that Oprah Winfrey would join the call to announce that her book had been chosen for Oprah’s Book Club. “This novel takes on some harrowing and really important things: poverty and injustice, corruption, prostitution, sex trafficking, all written by a woman who was 17 at the time, a young girl,” Winfrey told “CBS Mornings” in a video. “And the writer describes the book as an ode to the precarious and vulnerable world of teenage Black girls and her extraordinary empathy and her gorgeous writing reminds us that, yes, she’s also a poet.” Upon learning of Winfrey’s selection on that Zoom call, Mottley became emotional. “It was surreal,” she told “CBS Mornings” on Tuesday. Read more
What the book ‘The Last Suspicious Holdout’ says about the Black experience. By Juana Summers, Justin Kenin and Lauren Hodges / NPR
Ladee Hubbard’s brand-new collection of short stories, The Last Suspicious Holdout, takes place in an unnamed southern majority-Black suburb in the nineties and early 2000s. It’s designed like a kind of diary for the community, with interconnecting events, people and places. As the years tick by, the adults fight for justice and financial security while grieving lost loved ones; the children grow up and become aware of the struggles they will inherit. Ladee Hubbard spoke with NPR’s Juana Summers. Below are highlights from their conversation. Read more
Sports
Hall of Famer Grant Hill’s memoir ‘Game’ coming out in June. By AP and ABC News
Grant Hill’s path to the NBA Hall of Fame had plenty of pain along with all the highlights.
Hill has a deal with Penguin Press for the memoir “Game,” scheduled for June 7 and billed by the publishers as a “full, frank story” covering both the “pinnacle of success” and “the depths of personal trauma.” Hill will tell about helping Duke University win back-to-back NCAA titles, playing on the 1996 Olympics team that won the gold medal, and his achievements with such professional teams as the Detroit Pistons and Orlando Magic. He will also discuss the ankle problems that plagued him for years, and the health struggles of his wife, Tamia Hill, the singer, songwriter and actor who has been diagnosed with multiple sclerosis. Read more
Related: Grant Hill’s autobiography is a testament to Black resilience. By Jesse Washington / Andscape
From Russell to KG to today’s Celtics: Being a black player in Boston. By Marc J. Spears / Andscape
Stories of African Americans playing in a city that has struggled with racism
Boston Celtics guard Marcus Smart was expecting a simple drive home after a game during the 2016-17 season when he encountered a vocal Celtics fan he will never forget. The woman was with a little boy in the middle of the crosswalk outside of TD Garden when the light turned green for oncoming traffic. Smart honked his horn to warn her. “I yell out the window,” Smart recalled. “ ‘Excuse me, ma’am, you better get out of the street before you and your son get hit. Cars are coming. I don’t want you to get hit.’ “As soon as I said that, she looked at me – as she is wearing a No. 4, green with the white outline Celtics jersey – and told me, ‘F— you, you f—ing n—–.’ People that actually heard her were stunned. They’re like, ‘That’s Marcus Smart. You just got done watching the game, ma’am … with an Isaiah Thomas jersey on.’ ” Read more
Earl Monroe dishes on Stephen Curry, Pistol Pete Maravich and prepping kids for careers in basketball.
The Knicks legend speaks from the Earl Monroe New Renaissance Basketball School in New York, where he’s still a star
“You might watch a basketball game and see the players on the court, but you don’t see the hundreds of people who make that all possible,” Monroe said of the school, which was launched in September 2021 in the Bronx with 110 freshmen. “We’re trying to expose our kids to those jobs — from the building manager to the PR people to the broadcasters to the trainers — that they might not necessarily be familiar with.” Read more
The Biggest Power Couples In The NBA Playoffs 2022. By SportsDrop
Hollywood has a number of power couples that are often talked about. After all, how can you not love Jay-Z and Beyonce, or Blake Lively and Ryan Reynolds? Unfortunately, the power couples in the NBA aren’t always as well known. So, we’ve rounded up the top NBA couples that are dominating life on and off the court. Join us as we count down the NBA’s top power couples. Without further delay, here are the NBA’s most powerful duos! Read more
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