Featured
Democracy faces two threats. Trump is only one of them. By E. J. Dionne Jr. / Wash Post
Over the next year, the survival of democracy should be the central issue in American politics. To insist on this is to be a realist, not an alarmist. But making that case requires identifying two distinct threats.
The first is Donald Trump, who is already at the center of our national conversation. The second is the ongoing assault on voting rights, which rarely commands the airwaves. We are paying far less attention to the long-term deterioration of the right to vote, the essential building block of a democratic republic. It’s easier to overlook because chipping away at access to the ballot has been a subtle, decade-long process. It began with the Supreme Court’s 2013 Shelby County v. Holder decision that gutted Section 4 of the Voting Rights Act, thus sharply circumscribing the Justice Department’s power to enforce the law. Read more
Related: Trump Judges Decimate Voting Rights Act After Supreme Court Bat Signal. By Kate Riga / TPM
Political / Social
Clock ticking on Biden’s chances with progressives and young voters, key groups say. By Camila DeChalus / CNN
Young voters played a critical role in helping elect President Joe Biden to the White House. But now some progressive groups warn that the president will have to do more to win back support among these voters on issues such as gun reform, student debt, climate change and the Israel-Hamas war.
Dakota Hall – executive director of the Alliance for Youth Action, a national network of local organizations that aims to mobilize young voters – told CNN that Biden is running out of time to demonstrate to these voters, who were key to Biden’s coalition in 2020, that he will fulfill his 2020 campaign promises even as the president’s efforts to sign more bills into law are likely to be stalled in a divided Congress. Read more
GOP’s long-term plan to kill public schools in America might be succeeding. By SemDem / Daily Kos
Not long ago, everyone agreed that public education was a value in this nation, much like the notion of a democracy. Yet just like with Republicans shifting attitudes toward democracy, more prominent Republicans are now openly disparaging the entire concept of public schools.
Laura Ingraham claimed that “a lot of people are saying it’s time to defund government education or at least defund it by giving vouchers to parents.” Fox’s Greg Gutfeld similarly declared that private school vouchers are needed because public schools are “a destructive system” and described teachers as “KKK with summers off.” Read more
Related: Black Oklahoma educators step up to teach race in school. By Adrian Florido / NPR
Black Women Hired Onto Whiter Teams Are More Likely To Get Flagged As ‘Low Performers.’ By Monica Torres / HuffPost
A new Harvard study found that Black women hired onto whiter teams had worse job outcomes in retention and promotion.
Work long enough and you will learn that who you work with can matter more than what you actually work on if you want to get ahead. But who gets assigned as your co-worker on a team is largely out of the control of new hires. And for Black women, the number of white co-workers they have on their initial team can potentially make or break their experience at a job, according to a new Harvard Kennedy School working paper published in November. Read more
Related: Affirmative action backlash hits maternal health program for Black women. By Ronnie Cohen / 19th
Democrats need to get real about RFK Jr.’s strength with Black voters. By Alexi McCammond / Wash Post
To be sure, Biden maintains a stronghold with Black folks overall, but the polling trends show Black voters are losing interest in voting — and younger Black voters don’t typically share the same party loyalty as their older friends and family.
A staggering 28 percent of Black voters surveyed in a recent New York Times-Siena College poll would vote for Kennedy over Biden or Donald Trump if the election were held today. That’s more than double the 13 percent of Black voters who are backing Trump. That same survey found Biden is on track to make history as the first Democratic presidential candidate to get less than 80 percent of the Black vote since the civil rights era. Read more
Kamala Harris v. Gavin Newsom: The Coming Democratic Civil War. By Keith Naughton / The Messenger
The Democratic Party is united — for now.
Fear and loathing of Donald Trump keeps the various Democratic factions in a precarious peace. But labor v. environment, Jewish vote v. Muslim vote, and center-left v. hardcore progressivism cannot remain at bay forever. The fiercest battle may well be the looming civil war between Vice President Kamala Harris and California Gov. Gavin Newsom for the party leadership once President Biden leaves the stage. Read more
“The Mandates of Conscience”: Michelle Alexander on Israel, Gaza, MLK & Speaking Out in a Time of War. By Amy Goodman / Democracy Now
“But We Must Speak: On Palestine and the Mandates of Conscience.” That was the name of a recent event organized by the Palestine Festival of Literature here in New York, where leading writers and academics came together to speak out against Israel’s bombardment of Gaza.
This is civil rights attorney Michelle Alexander, renowned author of the book _The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness.” About five years ago, Alexander wrote a widely read op-ed piece for The New York Times headlined “Time to Break the Silence on Palestine.” Read more and listen here
Eric Adams Joins List of Black Men Accused of Sexual Assault Under Adult Survivors Act; Mayor Doesn’t Recall Meeting Jane Doe During Alleged Incident 30 Years Ago. By Nicole Duncan-Smith / Atlanta Black Star
New York City Mayor Eric Adams is under fire following the emergence of explosive sexual assault allegations just before Thanksgiving 2023. In response to these allegations, the mayor’s team has issued a strong statement vehemently denying any inappropriate sexual engagement with the woman in question.
The 2022 Adult Survivors Act was signed by New York Gov. Kathy Hochul. It opened a one-year period for adult victims of sexual offenses that are beyond the statute of limitations to file civil lawsuits against alleged abusers. Oscar winner Cuba Gooding Jr. and comedian Bill Cosby have both been named as predators under this act. Read more
Ethics / Morality / Religion
Before we find peace in the Mideast, we have to stop seeing only the ‘other.’ By Vishavjit Singh / Religion News
Thirty-nine years ago in India, I escaped death at the hands of a mob that had come to drag me and my family out on the streets of New Delhi because we were Sikhs. Since then every November is a somber reminder to me of the brutality we humans are capable of inflicting on each other. The ongoing Israeli-Hamas conflict makes this memory a bit more raw and tender.
Amid the tragic loss of innocent lives in Israel and now in Gaza, and all the ensuing grief, protests and intense conversations, one thing ripples inside me with a deep sense of unease: Humans’ ability to justify, at times even to cheer, the deaths of those we perceive as the “other.”I say this not as a judgment of Israelis or Palestinians, but as someone who has justified the deaths of my so-called “other.” If there is to be peace at the end of this horrible conflict, those involved must first free themselves from seeing each other only as enemies. Read more
How Trump is turning an evangelical ruse into a campaign of political terror. By Sarah Posner / MSNBC
Why Trump’s use of rhetoric like “cast out” will provoke amens from this loyal constituency.
Last Saturday, Donald Trump promised in a Truth Social post, “we will demolish the Deep State, we will expel the warmongers from our government, we will drive out the globalists, we will cast out the Communists, Marxists, and Fascists, we will throw off the sick political class that hates our Country, we will rout the Fake News Media, we will evict Joe Biden from the White House, and we will FINISH THE JOB ONCE AND FOR ALL!” The 2024 election, he wrote, “is our final battle.” Trump’s use of “cast out” will provoke amens from his most loyal constituency: white evangelicals. Read more
Related: Nikki Haley Courts Iowa Evangelicals Amid Poll Surge. By Harvest Prude / CT
Womanist Theology and A Black Woman’s Intellectual Movement. By A’Dorian Murray-Thomas / AAIHS
A woman swimming in cold water. (Michele Ursi/Shutterstock)
My grandmother stood neither silent nor conspicuous in her daily refutations of prescribed “good” Black girl behavior. She thrived in the in-between. Born Hattie Mae Murray, the third youngest of ten in rural South Carolina, she refused to call white people “ma’am” or “sir” growing up despite Southern convention. She talked back to white teachers in her segregated school and was often disciplined for failing to be the most “respectful” student. And, at the age of seventeen, just hours after graduating high school, she was on a midnight train to New Jersey for her shot at the American Dream. Read more
Saving Praise Houses Before Their African Lineage Is Forgotten. By Patricia Leigh Brown / NYT
Mary Rivers Legree at the Coffin Point Community Praise House she helped maintain for years on St. Helena Island, S.C., where Gullah Geechee culture endures.Credit…Candace Dane Chambers for The New York Times
The Gullah Geechee fight to preserve the tiny structures, a cradle of the Black church, before they’re erased by sprawl, climate change and fading memories. The Rev. Kay Colleton will never forget the time she first laid eyes on Moving Star Hall, a tiny white clapboard building with a leaning chimney, a crooked roof and a storied history. The hall is a rare surviving example of a praise house — humble one-room structures used as places of worship by enslaved people on coastal plantations throughout the Carolinas and Georgia. They have been providing spiritual sustenance for generations of African Americans ever since. Read more
Historical / Cultural
Indians and the American Story. By Peter C. Meilaender / The Bulwark
Ned Blackhawk’s award-winning history of suffering and survival.
Ned Blackhawk, a Yale professor of history and American studies, aims to change that with his recent book The Rediscovery of America, which last week won the 2023 National Book Award for nonfiction. “Exiled from the American origin story,” he writes, “Indigenous peoples await the telling of a history that includes them.” Beginning with Spanish settlers who pressed northward into the American southeast and Florida, following French trappers and traders who moved into the Great Lakes region from Canada, and tracking the flow of British migrating west from the eastern seaboard, Blackhawk argues that “encounter” and not “discovery” is the lens through which to understand American origins. Throughout the book, he emphasizes that relations with Native Americans are far from peripheral to the national story; instead, they helped shape the development of the United States of America in fundamental ways. Read more
The Missing History Of Africa In American Education. By Daina Ramey Berry / Forbes
As a professor of African American History, who spent years studying the African past and its influence on world culture and history, I often choose to begin my classes with a simple statement: Africans were free before they were enslaved.
African people show up exclusively as enslaved transports to the Americas via the transatlantic slave trade. Our textbooks introduce Africans as victims, using this history as a segue into African American history while ignoring the rich history of their ancestral lives prior to captivity. Read more
Black Music Sunday: ‘Simply the Best’: Remembering Tina Turner on her birthday. By Denise Oliver Velez / Daily Kos
On Nov. 26, 1939, Anna Mae Bullock was born in Nutbush, Tennessee to a factory worker mom and a Baptist deacon dad. Nutbush, at the time, had a population of 239. From these humble beginnings, Anna Mae would go on in life to be known and celebrated around the world as Tina Turner.
Often dubbed “the Queen of Rock ‘n’ Roll,” Turner also sang rhythm and blues, soul, and pop in the course of a career spanning over five decades. The list of awards she won is long, and includes eight Grammys. Read more and listen here.
Related: A new comic book celebrates music icon Tina Turner. By Kayla Grant / The Grio
Betye Saar Reassembles the Lives of Black Women. By Hilton Als / The New Yorker
Saar in 1978. She uses prefabricated pieces to show us how women of color have been repeatedly treated as props—accommodating, beneficent characters—in the never-ending drama of race.Photograph by Lezley Saar / Courtesy the artist / Roberts Projects
The artist Betye Saar lives less than two miles from the bars, billboards, and bustle of Los Angeles’s Sunset Boulevard, but her home, in Laurel Canyon, seems far removed from Sunset’s gleaming capitalism and packaged sex. Saar’s studio and house, where she has lived for more than sixty years—she is now ninety-seven—are dedicated to history, especially American history as it relates to Black women. Read more
The Black Los Angeles I grew up with is slipping away. By L. Lo Sontag / LA Times
A mail truck drives through a Los Angeles neighborhood.(Christina House / Los Angeles Times)
When I was growing up, it was a relatively calm, predominantly African American Los Angeles neighborhood. But the childhood I had in L.A. is no longer possible for most African Americans. We now live in exurbs across the county, dealing with some of the worst effects of the climate crisis and urban sprawl, including forced migration, social isolation and physical health ailments. Read more
Sports
Andscape roundtable: Was Colorado coach Deion Sanders’ first season a success? By Andscape Staff
Talking Shedeur Sanders’ future, where ‘Coach Prime’ is coaching next season, and more.
Year 1 of the Deion Sanders Experience at the University of Colorado is about to come to a close. The Buffaloes enter their final game of the season against Utah on Saturday with a 4-7 record and a five-game losing streak in Pac-12 play. But debate rages on about Sanders’ future, the future of his son, Shedeur Sanders, and whether or not “Coach Prime” will return to Colorado next season. Andscape columnists William C. Rhoden and Clinton Yates, and columnist Jean-Jacques Taylor discuss. Utah 23 – Colorado 17. Read more and listen here
HBCU Football Attract Tens Of Thousands Of Viewers On Average, According To FCS. By Lauren Nutall / Black Enterprise
Jackson State University’s football team had the highest attendance numbers out of all of the schools.
Trailing behind Jackson State in sixth place is Florida A&M University, which attracted 17,616 fans per game and meets 89.7 percent of capacity at Bragg Memorial Stadium. Southern University immediately follows in seventh place with an average of 17,465 in-person viewers. Alabama State University and Norfolk State University snagged two of the remaining top ten positions, landing at numbers eight and nine, respectively. Read more
Dawn Staley Becomes Highest Paid Black Women’s College Basketball Coach After Signing $22.4M Contract. By Gee NY / SMC
Dawn Staley has made history with a groundbreaking seven-year, $22.4 million contract, becoming the highest-paid Black coach in women’s basketball at the University of South Carolina.
The deal includes an annual salary of $1 million, with additional compensation starting at $1.9 million in the first year, increasing by $100,000 annually thereafter. South Carolina’s athletic director, Ray Tanner, praised Staley’s coaching prowess and anticipates further success for the Gamecocks. Read more
Beautiful Wives & Girlfriends of the NBA. By Marijean Grace / Sports Drop
On the court, the NBA is filled with plenty of stars. But the same is true off the court as well.
Top NBA players are almost always accompanied by beautiful, talented, powerful, and well-known women, creating power couples. With that in mind, we’ve rounded up some of the top NBA couples that are dominating life on and off the court. Join us as check out the NBA’s most powerful duos! Read more
Why has the Barry Sanders doc ‘Bye Bye Barry’ angered Scott Mitchell? By Mike Freeman / USA Today
If you want to understand just how far the Detroit Lions, who play on Thanksgiving Day, have come in recent years, how the team has developed into one of the NFL’s best stories, you need to first look at their past.
A new documentary about legendary Lions running back Barry Sanders does that but it’s the reaction from one person to it that speaks more about how the Lions have gone from a perennial joke to a possible Super Bowl champion. (Yes, I said they could win the Super Bowl this year.) Read more
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