Featured – After 100 years, Mussolini’s fascist party is a reminder of the fragility of freedom. By Richard Gunderman  / The Conversaation            

In my political philosophy course at Indiana University, my students and I study Mussolini’s rise to power and his dishonorable end. His life offers deep, cautionary insights for contemporary politics. First, the strongest protection against one-man rule is deep and widespread respect for democracy. A second lesson from fascism is to prevent the manufacture of emergencies. Another lesson is the danger of racism. In arguing that whites are superior to Africans and Asians, Mussolini laid the groundwork for exploitation, oppression and even extermination. Read more

The GOP’s campaign against Ilhan Omar backfires. By Ginna Green / Salon

Some of the loudest Republican Congressmen calling for punishment of Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.) have a history of deleted tweets, ties to white supremacist groups or records of using antisemitic tropes. Singling out Rep. Omar, in the midst of multiple instances of antisemitism by her colleagues and while she has been the target of violent anti-Muslim rhetoric, was misguided, in bad faith and a strategic mistake. Read more

White parents are enabling school segregation — if it doesn’t hurt their own kids. By Noah Berlatsky / NBC News

America has largely given up trying to desegregate its schools. Politicians have capitulated to reactionary white parents and activists who have successfully fought for decades against the government’s hesitant efforts to provide equal resources and opportunities for students of color. The result has been a disaster for non-white students, for public education and for the U.S. as a whole. Read more

Turns Out There’s a Proper Way to Buy Your Kid a College Slot. The Editorial Board / NYT

“There can be no separate college admissions system for the wealthy,” said Andrew Lelling, the United States attorney for the District of Massachusetts. He described the parents charged in the case as samples from “a catalog of wealth and privilege,” and he added, “For every student admitted through fraud, an honest, genuinely talented student was rejected.” Read more

‘What Does It Take?’: Admissions Scandal Is a Harsh Lesson in Racial Disparities. By John Eligon and Audra D.S. Bush / NYT

The students at Kauffman saw their charter school as something of an equalizer. The shiny, sprawling campus opened in 2011 on the city’s mostly black and economically disadvantaged East Side. Nine out of 10 students receive free or reduced lunch. But this week, the students there, and at high schools across the country, were reminded by the nation’s largest admissions scandal that there is nothing equal about the process. Read more

New Data Show The State Of Hate In Texas. By Luke O’Brien / HuffPost

People searching online for violent extremist content in Texas are mostly young, male and neo-Nazi-inclined. The searches happened all over Texas, regardless of the type of community. Limestone, Borden and Blanco counties had the most per capita searches for violent extremist content. These are rural, sparsely populated and deeply red counties that voted heavily for Donald Trump in 2016 and supported Republicans in the 2018 midterm elections. But just behind them were the urban, densely populated Democratic strongholds of Dallas and Travis counties. Read more

Now You Can Search To See If Hate Groups Live In Your Hometown. By Southern Poverty Law Center / The Daily Beast

Is your hometown a haven for hate groups? The Hate Map, released every year by the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC), shows where active hate groups are located in the U.S. Read more

The Tragedy of Baltimore. By Alec MacGillis / ProPublica

Since Freddie Gray’s death in 2015, violent crime has spiked to levels unseen for a quarter century. How order collapsed in an American city. Read more

In South Africa’s Fabled Wine Country, White and Black Battle Over Land. By Selam Gebrekidan and Normitsu Onishi / NYT

A generation after apartheid, the Stellenbosch region is gripped by a struggle that pits white citizens who still control much of the economy against their black neighbors. Read more

Timuel Black’s ‘Typical’ Life. By Norman Stockwell / The Progressive

This wonderful personal memoir, published shortly after the author’s one hundredth birthday (December 7, 2018), tells of growing up in Chicago as part of “The Great Migration” of blacks to the North. Timuel Black’s parents arrived in Chicago in 1919 when he was about eight months old and settled in the African American community known as Bronzeville. Read more

The One and Only Naomi Osaka. By Soraya Nadia McDonald / The Undefeated

She’s a riddle, wrapped in a mystery, inside a blistering forehand: For all her growing fame, the world’s No. 1 remains tough to define—just the way she likes it. Her parentage has made her an object of worldwide fascination. Osaka is no longer just Haitian and Japanese. She’s Haitian, Japanese and famous. Read more

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