Featured
Black Athletes Could Upset March Madness And End Attacks On DEI. By Shaun Harper / Forbes
The NCAA women’s and men’s basketball tournaments will generate approximately $900 million, according to ESPN. Most of this will be earned on the backs of Black athletes, many of whom attend universities in states where diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives are under legislative attack.
My 2018 analysis of NCAA data shows that Black men comprised around 2.4% of undergraduates at universities in the SEC, Big Ten, ACC, Pac-12, and Big 12 athletic conferences. Yet they made up 55% of football and 56% of men’s basketball teams across those high-profile institutions. With millions of Americans watching, these talented students could leverage March Madness to protect themselves and other people of color in higher education whom anti-DEI policies are harming. Read more
Related: In sports, DEI is not a luxury item, but a necessity. By William C. Rhoden / Andscape
Related: Target Boycotts Increase As Company Suffers Backlash Over Anti-DEI Policy. By Zack Linly / Newsone
Political / Social
What should come after DEI? PFJ. By Perry Bacon Jr. / Wash Post
DEI should not have been dismantled. But something better should replace it.
In many ways, diversity initiatives have been an attempt to address long-standing inequalities in an indirect, noncontroversial way, a kind of social justice on the cheap. PFJ (Power, freedom and justice), in contrast, is a straightforward, assertive vision. Justice nods at the idea of equity but is a superior concept. Equity is often treated as a synonym of equality, and the words obviously sound similar. In contrast, justice evokes the idea of fairness and morally correct outcomes. “Power is the inequality, and justice is the remedy,” Warikoo said. Read more
The danger of Trump’s “shock therapy” for America. By Chauncey Devega / Salon
During a speech last year, Russell Vought, who is one of the chief architects of Project 2025 and now Trump’s Director of the Office of Management and Budget (OMB), warned that federal workers should experience a lot of trauma.
What happens next? Who will the American people hold responsible for their suffering? Will the American people want more authoritarianism and fake populism happy pill poison? Or will the American people course correct and embrace real democracy and real populism that empowers and nurtures them and their communities and the larger society? Read more
‘The authoritarian playbook’: Trump targets judges, lawyers … and law itself. By Peter Stone / The Guardian
As Donald Trump aggressively seeks revenge against multiple foes in the US, he’s waging a vendetta using executive orders and social media against judges, law firms, prosecutors, the press and other vital American institutions to stifle dissent and exact retribution.
“Trump’s moves are from the authoritarian playbook,” said the Harvard law school lecturer and retired Massachusetts judge Nancy Gertner. “You need to delegitimize institutions that could be critics. Trump is seeking to use the power of the presidency to delegitimize institutions including universities, law firms, judges and others. It’s the opposite of American democracy.” Read more
Democrats Are Reaching a Trump Tipping Point. By Molly Jong-Fast / Vanity Fair
The party leadership’s tepid response to Donald Trump’s agenda could provoke a grassroots insurgency by its own voters.
Democrats probably should have elevated a new suite of leaders long ago, well before Trump’s second win. But now, the party’s very existence depends on it. Just look at all the tens of thousands of people flooding to rallies to see Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Bernie Sanders; all they’re doing is saying it like it is. And if the Chuck Schumers of the world continue to keep ignoring America’s terrifying reality and playing by the GOP’s rules, they’re setting the stage for a palace coup. Read more
Related: Bernie Sanders Is Tapping Into a Deep Vein of Anger in America. By Megan K. Stack / NYT
Republicans’ Social Security Attacks Disproportionately Harm Retirees of Color. By Julia Metraux / Mother Jones
Trump and Musk’s fake fraud stories are doing real damage—especially if you’re not white and wealthy.
According to the National Academy of Social Insurance, retirees of color are more likely to rely on Social Security as their sole source of income in comparison to white retirees—a consequence of being more likely to have jobs that don’t contribute to retirement funds or provide pensions, and of being less likely to have generational wealth. Read more
Related: Your Retirement Portfolio Is Like Kindling. Trump Just Lit a Match. By William D. Cohan / NYT
How our public schools are tied to the health of our democracy. By Chauncey Devega / Salon
Control over America’s educational system and schools is essential for creating compliant subjects who will internalize and normalize these autocratic and authoritarian (and outright fascist) values, beliefs, and ways of living and thinking.
In an attempt to better understand how America’s educational system is under siege in the Age of Trump and how the lessons of the long Black Freedom Struggle can be applied today in the struggle to defend American democracy and freedom, I recently spoke with Derek W. Black. He is the Ernest F. Hollings Chair in Constitutional Law at the University of South Carolina and one of the country’s leading experts in education, law and public policy. Read more
Related: Accreditation Is Trump’s ‘Secret Weapon.’
Federal Investigators Were Preparing Two Texas Housing Discrimination Cases — Until Trump Took Over. By Jesse Coburn / ProPublica
The government spent years probing allegations that a Dallas HOA created rules to kick poor Black people out and that Texas discriminated against minority residents in Houston after Hurricane Harvey, only to suddenly reverse course under Trump.
The episodes amounted to egregious violations of civil rights laws, officials at the housing agency believed — enough to warrant litigation against the alleged culprits. That, at least, was the view during the presidency of Joe Biden. After the Trump administration took over, HUD quietly took steps that will likely kill both cases, according to three officials familiar with the matter. Read more
Reps. Ilhan Omar And Yvette D. Clarke Sound The Alarm On Injustice Faced By Black Immigrants. By and / HuffPost
More than one in ten Black people in the United States are immigrants.
There are myriad reasons why people might immigrate to the U.S. instead of other destinations, but what we have been experiencing in recent years is not separable from what is truly a global phenomenon. This means we can’t deport our way out of the problem like Donald Trump wants us to believe. Read more
World News
Israel approves controversial proposal to facilitate emigration of Palestinians from Gaza. By Dana Karni, Tim Lister and
Britain backs force for Ukraine but security community has doubts. By Karla Adam / Wash Post
Analysts warn a European force would have difficulty sustaining a peacekeeping mission over time — particularly if there’s no backing from the United States.
British Prime Minister Keir Starmer was among the first leaders to volunteer troops to help protect a postwar Ukraine. With French President Emmanuel Macron, he’s working to recruit partners for a coalition of the willing to staff an international peacekeeping force. Read more
What the Venezuelans Deported to El Salvador Experienced. By Philip Holsinger / Time
On the night of Saturday, March 15, three planes touched down in El Salvador, carrying 261 men deported from the United States. A few dozen were Salvadoran, but most of the men were Venezuelans the Trump Administration had designated as gang members and deported, with little or no due process. I was there to document their arrival.
The transfer from the plane to the buses that would carry them to prison was rapid, yet it might as well have been the crossing of an ancient continent. I felt the detainees’ fear as they marched through a gauntlet of black-clad guards, guns raised like the spears of some terrible tribe. Read more
Voice of America brought light to dark places. Just ask Martina Navratilova. By Sally Jenkins / Wash Post
When the future tennis star was growing up behind the Iron Curtain, hearing U.S. music and the news of the world “was our lifeline.”
Voice of America saved Navratilova and her family from existential perishing. It has saved countless other people and events from the same. Now it’s in danger of perishing itself, victim of the Trump administration’s fervor for gutting and silencing federal agencies, including the U.S. Agency for Global Media, which oversees VOA. This is a feat even the communists were never able to accomplish and which China celebrated by calling VOA “a dirty rag.” Read more
Ethics / Morality / Religion
These churches offer shelter and sanctuary to vulnerable migrants. Here’s why. By Patrick Davis , Anna King and Sarah Ventre / NPR
The Rev. Jim Rigby has one question on his mind these days: What’s the plan if immigration officers knock on his church’s doors? “That’s what I’m feverishly trying to figure out — I’m trying to talk to lawyers,” said Rigby, a pastor of St. Andrew’s Presbyterian Church in Austin, Texas.
Until recently, churches were considered “sensitive locations” and immigration officers were restricted from taking action there. But on his first full day in office, President Trump rescinded these restrictions, making churches and other houses of worship susceptible to immigration enforcement. Read more
The far-right’s pretend fight against antisemitism is a perfect political strategy. By Rachel Shabi / The Guardian
The far-right has found in its pretend fight against antisemitism a way to divide progressives while at the same time clobbering them.
As Amy Spitalnick of the Jewish Council for Public Affairs, one of multiple Jewish groups opposing Khalili’s detention, said: “The Trump administration is exploiting real concerns about antisemitism to undercut democracy.” Meanwhile, it is grotesque to pretend that Team Trump, home to antisemitic conspiracy theories, Nazi salutes and Holocaust denialism, is fighting antisemitism, rather than actively reproducing it. Read more
A Bold Design for a New South. By Martin Luther King Jr. / The Nation (March 30, 1963 issue)
Throughout our history, the moral decision has always been the correct decision.
From our determination to be free in 1776, to our shedding of the evil of chattel slavery in 1863, to our decision to stand against the wave of fascism in the 1930s, we grew and became stronger in our commitment to the democratic tradition. The correct decision in 1963 will make it a genuine turning point in human rights. One hundred years ago a President, tortured by doubts, finally ended slavery and a new American society took shape. Lincoln had hoped the slavery issue could be relegated to secondary place, but life thrust it into the center of history. There segregation, the evil heritage of slavery, remains. Read more
The mysticism of Thea Bowman. By Angela R. Hooks / Christian Century
As I studied Christian mystics, I kept wondering where the Black women were. Then I discovered Sister Thea.
In my own research, I discovered that the life of Thea Bowman mirrors those of the great Christian mystics. Sister Thea, née Bertha Elizabeth Bowman, heard God’s call at a young age and became a Catholic sister—the first African American member of the Franciscan Sisters of Perpetual Adoration. Rather than cloister herself in a convent, Bowman lived as an active contemplative, fighting for racial and social justice. She endured enormous personal suffering while continuing to serve her community and church. Read more
Historical / Cultural
Niagara Movement (1905-1909). By Stephanie Christensen / BlackPast.org
The Niagara Movement was a civil rights group organized by W.E.B. Du Bois and William Monroe Trotter in 1905. After being denied admittance to hotels in Buffalo, New York, the group of twenty-nine business owners, teachers, and clergy who comprised the initial meeting gathered at Niagara Falls, Ontario (Canada) from which the group’s name derives.
The Niagara Movement attempted to bring about legal change, addressing the issues of crime, economics, religion, health, and education. The movement stood apart from other black organizations at the time because of its powerful, unequivocal demand for equal rights. Read more
The Rise and Fall of a Grand Dragon of the Ku Klux Klan. By Jeff Shesol / NYT (April 2, 2023 issue)
In a new book, Timothy Egan traces the Klan’s expansion in the 1920s across American political and civic life. Then its leader, David C. Stephenson, committed murder.
The scene, in some ways, could not have been more commonplace. On July 4, 1923, in a creekside park in Kokomo, Ind., families celebrated Independence Day with flags and bunting, watermelon and pie, patriotic songs, a parade. Commonplace — except that these families, many thousands in number, wore the white hoods and robes of the Ku Klux Klan. Banners insisted that “America is for Americans”; floats portrayed Klansmen defending women from Black people and Catholics. Read more
Mia Love, first Black Republican congresswoman, dies at 49. By Adam Bernstein and Annabelle Timsit / Wash Post
She backed the GOP agenda but challenged Trump when he denigrated immigrants from Haiti.
From 2015 to 2019, Mrs. Love represented an overwhelmingly Republican congressional district that includes much of Salt Lake County and part of Salt Lake City. Her victory in a conservative, majority-White state — following a high-profile speech at the 2012 Republican National Convention that emphasized her family’s immigration story — was seen as an indicator of potential GOP support among voters of color. Read more
Kennedy Center guts social impact team; more layoffs expected. By Travis M. Andrews and Kriston Capps / Wash Post
Race-Friendly Places For Black Americans Looking To Relocate. By Bilal G. Morris / Newsone
Being Black in America ain’t easy and with Donald Trump causing havoc on the American democracy, things could get worse before they get better. Here are five countries that will welcome any Black Americans looking to relocate abroad. Read more
Sports
Milwaukee Bucks head coach Doc Rivers approaches a coaching milestone. By Marc J. Spears / Andscape
Rivers can tie Phil Jackson for seventh on the NBA’s all-time coaching wins list
Rivers entered the Milwaukee Bucks’ game against the Phoenix Suns on Monday a win shy of tying Jackson for seventh on the NBA all-time coaching wins list. Rivers has 1,154 wins during a 26-year coaching career with the Orlando Magic, Celtics, Los Angeles Clippers, Philadelphia 76ers and the Bucks. Jackson had 1,155 regular-season wins with the Chicago Bulls and Lakers and 11 titles over 20 seasons. Read more
The Foreman-Ali Rumble That Changed Their Careers, and Congo. By John Eligon / NYT
The African nation of Zaire was elated. Its president, Mobutu Sese Seko, had struck a deal in 1974 for the country to host potentially the biggest boxing contest in history: Muhammad Ali, a legend seemingly on the decline, versus George Foreman, a ferocious, rising heavyweight world champion. Read more
At home with the Warriors, Jimmy Butler is winning and unbothered: ‘I’ll take being the bad guy.’ By Anthony Slater / The Athletic
“We welcome personal quirkiness and individualism, and I think guys always feel a sense of freedom here,” Kerr said. “I told Jimmy that from Day 1. I said, ‘You be you.’”
For Butler, it was an easy sell. No matter how he gets to practices and games (often separate from the team), he’s extremely punctual. He’s also considered one of the NBA’s premier winners, and his arrival has coincided with a complete turnaround. The Warriors were 25-26 before acquiring him. They are 16-4 since. Read more
Lewis Hamilton’s China F1 sprint win proved his growing confidence – and responded to ‘yapping’ about Ferrari start. By Luke Smith / The Athletic
“I’m just going to make a masterplan of how to win,” Hamilton said with a chuckle. “Then I’ve got to try and execute it! That’s where the mindset is at.” He dodged a question asking if it was the first weekend since the ground effect cars arrived in 2022 where he felt truly confident behind the wheel, but did acknowledge it was “probably one of the happiest in terms of being able to get out there and drive.” Read more
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