Featured
Poll: Black Americans Think Racism Is a “Major Threat” and Getting Worse. By Pema Levy / Mother Jones
A new survey taken after the Buffalo massacre shows a pessimistic view of America.
At a time when Republican state legislatures are trying to erase the existence of racism from classrooms and employer trainings, Black Americans believe white supremacy is a growing threat. According to a new Washington Post-Ipsos Poll conducted after the racist massacre in Buffalo, New York, last weekend, three-quarters of Black people fear a physical attack against them or a loved one motivated by race. The same number of Black respondents said white supremacists are a “major threat,” and 66 percent believe white supremacy has gotten worse over the last five years. Read more
Related: The Real Dangers Of The Right-Wing Attacks On Anti-Racist Education. By Nathalie Baptiste / HuffPost
Related: Florida Is Banning “Social Justice” From its K-12 Textbooks. By Pema Levy / Mother Jones
Political / Social
House passes bill to aid fight against domestic terrorism after Buffalo supermarket shooting. By Benjamin Siegel / ABC News
The vote was 222-203, with all Democrats voting in favor of the proposal.
In the wake of the Buffalo, New York, supermarket shooting that left 10 Black people dead, the House on Wednesday approved a measure to beef up federal efforts to combat domestic terrorism and white supremacy. The bill from Rep. Brad Schneider, D-Illinois, would create new offices within the Justice Department, Department of Homeland Security and Federal Bureau of Investigation to “monitor, analyze, investigate, and prosecute domestic terrorism.” Read more
Buffalo Schools Grapple With Racist Attack. By Katie Reilly / Time
Ater 10 people were killed in a racist shooting at a Buffalo supermarket last week, Fatima Morrell knew the city’s educators could not avoid discussing the tragedy with students. “We can’t shy away from the facts of the case,” says Morrell, the associate superintendent for culturally and linguistically responsive initiatives in Buffalo public schools. “For all our children, we have to unpack white supremacy, as hard as that is to talk about.” Read more
Related: White supremacy is doing well for itself. By Colbert I. King / Wash Post
Related: Family of Buffalo shooting victim may sue major gun manufacturer. By Jericka Duncan / CBS News
The long struggle to bring a supermarket to a nearly all-Black Buffalo neighborhood. By
The attack struck at a symbol of hard-won progress for the East Side, where 85% of the city’s Black residents live. The area is scarred by a legacy of racial segregation, economic and political neglect, dilapidated housing and other barriers. Buffalo remains one of the most segregated cities in America. Tops “was an institution we fought for. It didn’t just end up there,” said Henry Louis Taylor Jr., the director of the University at Buffalo’s Center for Urban Studies and a historian of race and class. “We used our political power and clout to make it happen. It represented a significant venture against food apartheid.” Read more
Study: The Pandemic Worsened Racial Achievement Gaps. By Giulia Heyward / Capital B
Black and Hispanic students bore the brunt of the pandemic loss compared to white classmates, according to a recent study.
Virtual schooling during the pandemic has had a debilitating effect on academic progress for Black and Hispanic students, expanding already wide test-score gaps with their white counterparts, according to a new working paper from the National Bureau of Economic Research. Those learning losses will have “major impacts” on Black and Hispanic students’ future financial earnings, unless schools use the bulk of their federal aid to help students recover academically, the researchers concluded. Read more
On Race, Herschel Walker’s Offer of Absolution Divides Georgia Voters. /NYT
Herschel Walker, the former football star leading Georgia’s Republican primary for Senate, had a mixed message about racial issues for 70 or so supporters, mainly white, who came to hear his stump speech this week at the Georgia Sports Hall of Fame. He started with a joking aside — “I don’t know if you know this, but I’m Black” — before asking, “Where is this racism thing coming from?” Accusations of bigotry, he suggested, are often thrown around as a way to silence people like those in the crowd. Read more
Summer Lee, Declaring Victory in Pennsylvania, Puts Dark Money Democrats on Notice. By Abigail Tracy / Vanity Fair
The United Democracy Project, a super PAC for the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, poured millions to defeat Lee in a Pennsylvania House primary. Similar dark money groups have targeted several progressives.
Around seven weeks before Pennsylvania’s primary elections, Summer Lee commanded a lead of 25 points over rival Steve Irwin in the race for Pennsylvania’s 12th District, a blue stronghold encompassing Pittsburgh and its surrounding suburbs. It appeared that Lee, 34, a Black woman and progressive activist who currently serves as a Pennsylvania state representative, would make history. Then came the outside money. Read more
At Wells Fargo, a Quest to Increase Diversity Leads to Fake Job Interviews. By Emily Fitter / NYT
Black and female candidates are sometimes interviewed after the recipient of a job is identified, current and former employees say.
Joe Bruno, a former executive in the wealth management division of Wells Fargo, had long been troubled by the way his unit handled certain job interviews. For many open positions, employees would interview a “diverse” candidate — the bank’s term for a woman or person of color — in keeping with the bank’s yearslong informal policy. But Mr. Bruno noticed that often, the so-called diverse candidate would be interviewed for a job that had already been promised to someone else. He complained to his bosses. They dismissed his claims. Last August, Mr. Bruno, 58, was fired. Read more
Cancer deaths in Black people drop; still higher than others. Lindsey Tanner / AP and ABC News
A new study says cancer deaths rates have steadily declined among Black people but remain higher than in other racial and ethnic groups
The rates among Black people fell 2% each year from 1999 to 2019, from 359 cancer deaths per 100,000 to 239 deaths per 100,000, according to the report published online in JAMA Oncology. In 2019, the highest cancer death rates were in Black men — 294 deaths per 100,000 — almost double the lowest rate in Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders. The rate for white men was 249 deaths per 100,000. For Hispanic men, it was 177 deaths per 100,000 and 255 deaths per 100,000 among Native American men. Read more
Ethics / Morality / Religion
Buffalo shooting should be a wake-up call for white Catholics. By John Gehring / NCR
A faithful Catholic can never be a Christian nationalist without defying the Gospel because Catholicism, a global faith, calls us to advocate for the global common good. We stand in the shadow of the cross, not the flag. But as Catholics we are also the inheritors of a tradition that long perpetuated white supremacy as a religiously sanctioned policy. And still today, too many white Catholics with money and power spend more time lashing out at the Black Lives Matter movement and mocking what they deride as “wokeism” on the left than fighting systemic racism. Read more 
How the Early Church Dealt with Racial and Cultural Division. By Rasool Berry / Christianity Today
They saw that their ability to truly be the church was at stake.
In the Acts of the Apostles, Luke highlights one of the greatest threats the early church faced: ethnocentrism and cultural pride within the fellowship of believers. As the gospel spread beyond the initial band of Jesus’ Jewish followers across geographic and cultural boundaries, these impulses threatened to pull the adolescent church apart. Eventually the controversy led to the Jerusalem Council described in Acts 15. Read more
Leading Psychologist Bridges Trauma Healing and the Black Church. By Jacqueline J. Holness / Christianity Today
Incoming American Psychological Association president Thema Bryant’s “psychology for the people” approach is already helping break Christian stigmas around therapy.
Thema Bryant’s calling to psychology started when she picked up her family’s home telephone as a pastor’s kid growing up in Baltimore. Her father, Bishop John R. Bryant, led Bethel African Methodist Episcopal (AME) Church—one of the biggest congregations in the city and the oldest in Maryland. “People would often call our home in moments of crisis,” said Bryant. “When people are in a moment of crisis, it often doesn’t matter who answers the phone, they kind of get started with whatever the issue is, and I was always drawn to bearing witness and to being willing to hear and listen and to encourage from very early on.” Read more
Related: New African Methodist Episcopal Church Publishing House for an evolving Nashville. RNS Press Release
Historical / Cultural
The Root of Haiti’s Misery: Reparations to Enslavers. By Catherine Porter, Constant Méheut, Matt Apuzzo and Gebrekidan / NYT
For generations after independence, Haitians were forced to pay the descendants of their former slave masters, including the Empress of Brazil; the son-in-law of the Russian Emperor Nicholas I; Germany’s last imperial chancellor; and Gaston de Galliffet, the French general known as the “butcher of the Commune” for crushing an insurrection in Paris in 1871. The burdens continued well into the 20th century. The wealth Ms. Present’s ancestors coaxed from the ground brought wild profits for a French bank that helped finance the Eiffel Tower, Crédit Industriel et Commercial, and its investors. They controlled Haiti’s treasury from Paris for decades, and the bank eventually became part of one of Europe’s largest financial conglomerates. Read more
How deep-rooted White fear throughout America’s history allows massacres like Buffalo to happen. By Brandon Tensley / CNN
“Consider Madison Grant’s ‘The Passing of the Great Race’ (1916),” Kruse wrote. “Older Americans from the ‘Nordic race,’ Grant warned, were increasingly being displaced by newer immigrants from southern and eastern Europe. White Anglo-Saxon Protestants, Grant complained, weren’t reproducing at rates fast enough to keep up with ‘the Slovak, the Italian, the Syrian and the Jew.’” Kruse noted further that, “in ‘The Rising Tide of Color: The Threat Against White World Supremacy’ (1920), Lothrop Stoddard warned that white races were being engulfed by the more fertile colored races,” and that, ‘in the Saturday Evening Post, Kenneth Roberts warned about arrivals of Polish Jews, who were ‘human parasites.’” Read more
Racists Once Terrorized This Georgia County. Diversity Made It Prosper. By Jonathan Weisman / NYT
The slow return of diversity to an area that brutally drove out its Black residents has been accompanied by a boom that gives the lie to “Great Replacement” conspiracy theories.
In October 1912, after the raped and brutalized body of Mae Crow, a white 18-year-old, was laid to rest beside the Pleasant Grove Baptist Church, the white men of Forsyth County went on a rampage, driving its 1,098 Black citizens — about 10 percent of the population — from Forsyth’s borders. But a century later, Forsyth County also refutes white supremacists who believe that, as Payton Gendron, the charged Buffalo gunman, put it: “Diversity is not a strength.” The county’s whites-only century was one of stagnation and isolation. Only after the sprawl of Greater Atlanta eventually overwhelmed Forsyth’s defenses in the late 1990s and 2000s did this county boom. Read more
The Memory of George Floyd Is Literally Fading Across America. By Charles M. Blow / NYT
In the end, transformative national change proved to be an illusion. Inflation, a war in Ukraine, public safety, abortion and even a baby formula crisis have overtaken the zeitgeist. Support for Black Lives Matter has diminished. Federal police reform and federal voter protection both failed to pass the Senate. And the founders of Black Lives Matter have been drawn into controversies about how they handled its money. Read more
Reparations for Black Americans? Harvard case shows history’s horror. By Tiffany Cusaac-Smith/ USA Today
Near the close of the American Revolution, Belinda Sutton told of how enslavers snatched her from her parents at around 12 in an African hallowed grove, transported her across the Atlantic Ocean, and bound her to Harvard benefactor Isaac Royall, Jr. Sutton, by then a free woman, shared her story as part of a 1783 reparations petition to the Massachusetts General Court after decades of “ignoble servitude.” Sutton’s face, the petition read, is “now marked with the furrows of time,” and her frame feebly bends under years of oppression after being denied “enjoyment of one morsel” of Royall’s immense wealth from decades of work. Read more
Historic Enslaved Grave Sites in Louisiana Could Be Disrupted. By Seth Freed Wessler / Propublica
In July of 2021, a professional architectural historian named Erin Edwards delivered what she expected would be the near-final draft of a report about a contested swath of sugar cane plantation land along the Mississippi River in Louisiana. The painstaking survey, for her bosses at a consulting firm, was supposed to identify harms to historic sites so that developers can prevent or minimize them. Edwards’ report detailed how a proposed $400 million grain elevator, almost the height of the Statue of Liberty, would disrupt sites that are both sacred and dedicated to educating people about slavery and its aftermath. Read more
‘We’re still here’: past and present collide at a Native American boarding school. By Hillary Beaumont / The Guardian
Sherman Indian high school is among the last remnants of a brutal history that students and government are reckoning with
“People think that we’re extinct – they think we don’t really exist anymore,” said the 17-year-old student, who goes by Kimmi. Dancing at Sherman Indian high school cultural week, she said she was showing “we are still here”. Most of the schools have closed, but the government continues to operate a handful, including Sherman. The US says it has transformed the remaining schools, but students like Medicine feel echoes of the old system. Read more
For African Americans tired of U.S. hostility, Ghana is still calling. By Karen Attiah / Wash Post
W. E. B. Du Bois outside his home in Accra, Ghana, c. January 1963. Photo by Ruth Lazarus. (W. E. B. Du Bois Papers, Robert S. Cox Special Collections and University Archives Research Center, UMass Amherst Libraries.)
Accra, Ghana — In 1961, 93-year-old Black scholar and historian W.E.B. Du Bois moved to Ghana, and soon after he was granted Ghanaian citizenship. He had endured Jim Crow racism, FBI surveillance and the confiscation of his passport by the United States, and decided it was enough. He handed White America a scathing resignation notice, in the form of a poem, “Ghana Calls,” which in part reads:
“From reeking West whose day is done,
Who stink and stagger in their dung
Toward Africa…
Come with us, dark America:
The scum of Europe battened here
And drowned a dream
Made fetid swamp a refuge seem …” Read more
Dancing to ‘Billie Jean’ Led Him to ‘MJ.’ Now He’s a Tony Contender. By Michael Paulson / NYT
Just five years after he performed as Michael Jackson at a high school talent show, Myles Frost is making his debut in a Broadway musical about the King of Pop.
Myles Frost was a college junior in Maryland, studying audio engineering, when he got the call that would change his life. Five years earlier, he had performed “Billie Jean” at a high school talent show, and his mom had filmed the performance on her iPad. Now Frost, at 22, is on Broadway, drawing ovations nightly in the title role of “MJ,” a biomusical exploring Jackson’s creative process by imagining the final days of rehearsals for the “Dangerous” concert tour. The effect is uncanny: Although Frost insists he is not doing an impersonation, audiences describe feeling as if they are at a Michael Jackson concert. Read more
Heavily-Sampled Artist Bernard Wright Has Passed Away At 58. By Bandini / Ambrosia
Bernard Wright was a vocalist, keyboardist, and songwriter who made blended Jazz with Funk, and other genres. His prodigious 1981 album ‘Nard featured songs that have been sampled into Hip-Hop hits by LL Cool J, Skee-Lo, Snoop Dogg, and J-Live. Later, the son of Roberta Flack and bassist Steve Novosel collaborated with Doug E. Fresh, Miles Davis, Cameo, and Bobby Brown, among others. Read more
Sports
Collegiate Gymnastics Provides a Platform for Social Expression. By Lois Elfman / Diverse Issues In Higher Education
In a dynamic floor routine during the most recent collegiate gymnastics season, University of Minnesota sophomore Mya Hooten included a piece of choreography between tumbling passes — she pounded her chest and gave a Black Power salute. In a fun, flirty and original routine, she delivered a message about social justice, racial justice, and Black women empowerment. Read more
NY Yankees Donaldson repeatedly calls opposing black player “Jackie.” By Michael / Daily Kos
“He just made a disrespectful comment,” Anderson said. “Basically he was trying to call me Jackie Robinson. ‘What’s up, Jackie?’ I don’t play like that. I don’t really play at all. I wasn’t really going to bother nobody today, but he made the comment and you know it was disrespectful and I don’t think it was called for. It was unnecessary.” For those who don’t know, Tim Anderson is black. Read more
How Muhammad Ali’s Conversion Got Dismissed as “Brainwashing.” By Rebecca L. Davis / Slate
The idea came, first, from the boxer’s own father.
When Ali announced to the world in 1964 that he was a Muslim, he was not only mocked but forced to sideline his boxing career. Far from a man of principle, an American patriot representing his nation on the world stage, he was derided as a “brainwashed” fool. “Brainwashing” connotes the loss of a person’s ability to make a free choice, but that freedom was exactly what Muhammad Ali claimed when he defended his new faith. “I know where I’m going and I know the truth and I don’t have to be what you want me to be. I’m free to be who I want,” he told reporters in Miami. Read more
Site Information
Articles appearing in the Digest are archived on our home page. And at the top of this page register your email to receive notification of new editions of Race Inquiry Digest.
Click here for earlier Digests. The site is searchable by name or topic. See “search” at the top of this page.
About Race Inquiry and Race Inquiry Digest. The Digest is published on Mondays and Thursdays.
Use the customized buttons below to share the Digest in an email, or post to your Facebook, Linkedin or Twitter accounts.