Race Inquiry Digest (October 30) – Important Current Stories On Race In America

Featured – James Madison’s Lessons in Racism. Madison is the founding father who can teach Americans the most about our present contradictions on race. Madison understood perfectly well that slavery was morally wrong — and why. But he also could not overcome the economic reality on which his entire livelihood and that of the family plantation was based. Read more 
Trump, “Heritage,” and the G.O.P.’s White Identity Crisis. 2016 was a lesson in the power of racial politics—and the apotheosis of a decades-long realignment. Read more 

Why Study the History of the KKK? We Are Currently Reliving It. In historian Linda Gordon’s “The Second Coming of the KKK,” we hear echoes of an American past that isn’t dead. Read more 

Ta-Nehisi Coates’s Uneasy Hope. The writer’s critics call him a cynic. But a new anthology shows, his thinking has matured in subtle ways over the years. Read more      

Basketball’s Positionless Savior Is Ready for Primetime. Shoot threes like Bird, dunk like Jordan, or pass like Magic? A new generation of NBA stars, led by Milwaukee’s Giannis Antetokounmpo, no longer have to choose. Read more 

The European Roots of the Alt-Right. The European New Right first emerged in France in the late 1960s and argued that the right of cultures to preserve their identity in turn implied their right to exclude or expel groups and ideas that threatened their cohesion and continuity. Read more 

Confronting the Legacy of the Civil War: The Forgotten Front. The conflict was fought by proxy in the West, but one thing united the warring factions: the doctrine of white supremacy and genocidal violence against Indians. Read more 

Can this Confederate monument be redeemed? From New Orleans to Charlottesville, Confederate monuments are dropping from their pedestals. But no memorial is quite as problematic as the centerpiece of this Edenic retreat on the outskirts of Atlanta. Read more 

Sade’s Quiet Storm of Cool. Sade is one of the most relentlessly quiet famous people on the planet. But in her extended silences, her place in the pantheon of cultural influence has only grown more enormous. Read more 

“I am a conservative Christian” Rev. Barber speaks to church in Appalachia. Rev Barber was invited to speak at Trinity Episcopal Church in Spruce Pine, NC in Mitchell Country. He took time to explain what Moral Monday movement: It is not about Republican vs Democratic, white vs black. It is about being right vs wrong. Watch here 

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