Featured
Fear of Fascism. By Tom Nichols / The Atlantic
I’ve long resisted using the word fascism to describe Donald Trump and his Republican followers, but we have to overcome our reluctance to use strong language and admit that America is now beset by a dangerous antidemocratic movement masquerading as a party. The GOP itself might not meet the full definition of a “fascist” party—not yet, anyway—but it’s not a normal party, and its base is not an ordinary political movement. It is, instead, a melding of the remnants of a once-great party with an authoritarian, violent, seditionist personality cult bent on capturing and exercising power solely to benefit its own members and punish its imagined enemies among other Americans. Read more
Related: Maybe US mainstream media should begin using the term ‘fascism.’ By Robert Reich / The Guardian
Political / Social
More than 40% of Americans think civil war likely within a decade | US politics. By Martin Pengelly / The Guardian
More than half of ‘strong Republicans’ think such a conflict is at least somewhat likely, poll finds
Amid heated rhetoric from supporters of Donald Trump, the findings, in research by YouGov and the Economist, follow similar results in other polls. On Sunday night, the South Carolina senator Lindsey Graham predicted “riots in the streets” if Trump is indicted over his retention of classified documents after leaving the White House, materials recovered by the FBI at Trump’s home this month. Read more
Related: Ron DeSantis Is a Test Case. By Thomas B. Edsall / NYT
Biden to give prime-time speech about ‘soul of the nation’ as voters prepare to cast midterm ballots. By Mike Memoli / NBC News
The president is expected to speak Thursday night outside Independence Hall in Philadelphia.
President Joe Biden plans to deliver a prime-time speech this week about how America’s “rights and freedoms are still under attack,” returning to the core message of his 2020 campaign as Americans are getting ready to vote in the November midterm elections. A White House official said Thursday’s address at Independence National Historical Park in Philadelphia would focus on “the continued battle for the soul of the nation” and show how the president sees the central argument of his 2020 candidacy remains as salient as ever with the midterm elections coming into clearer focus. Read more
Abrams, Georgia Dems call midterms ‘unfinished business.’ By Bill Barrow and Jeff Amy / AP and ABC News
Georgia Democrats had a contested primary for governor four years ago because the party old guard didn’t believe in Stacey Abrams
Now Abrams and Warnock top the Democratic ticket together for the first time as the party tries to replicate its success in a tough midterm election landscape. The outcome will again help determine the balance of power in Washington and whether Republicans retain their dominance in state government. “We’re going to defy all the naysayers and take our state all the way back,” Abrams told delegates to the Democratic state convention Saturday. “Georgia Democrats, we’ve got unfinished business to take care of.” Read more
Los Angeles Is Creating a Model for Fighting Mass Incarceration. By Mark Engler and Paul Engler / Dissent
Abolitionists and advocates of criminal justice reform in Los Angeles County have amassed some impressive victories, laying out a vision for reducing incarceration and providing care that could have national significance.
First, in 2019, a coalition against mass incarceration succeeded in stopping a prison expansion plan that the county claimed would cost $2 billion, but that activists and community leaders charged could drain in excess of $3.5 billion in public funds. Subsequently, grassroots groups steered the work of a county Alternatives to Incarceration Workgroup, which in 2020 produced a set of recommendations that JusticeLA, a coalition of more than fifty community organizations, unions, and activist groups, called “a groundbreaking roadmap for decarceration and service expansion.” Read more
How homebuyers of color are disproportionately impacted by rising mortgage rates. By Paul Solman / PBS Podcast
Rising mortgage rates and lingering inflation are forcing many Americans to put plans to buy a home on hold. That is pushing up rent prices for others. As economics correspondent Paul Solman explains, no one has experienced that more acutely over the last year than people of color. It’s part of our ongoing series, “Race Matters.” Listen here
Related: The thing Black families do before selling a home. By Gayle Fleming / CNN
Mississippi’s largest city in water crisis as treatment plant fails. By Emmanuel Felton and Bryan Pietsch / Wash Post
Inadequate funding for essential infrastructure upgrades and tension between state and city leaders helped fuel the emergency.
Jackson, which is 82 percent Black, had been under a boil-water advisory for the past month, after trouble with the main pumps at the O.B. Curtis Water Treatment Plant. The situation escalated this week, after heavy rainfall and near-record flooding on the Pearl River completely knocked out service at the city’s primary water treatment plant. Read more
In St. Louis, doulas push for better reproductive health care — especially for Black patients. By Gabrielle Hays / PBS
Black women in Missouri, who are four times more likely to die in childbirth than others in the state, Southall-Wamhoff said, pointing to findings from the state’s Missouri’s Pregnancy-Associated Mortality Review (PAMR) board published last year. Black women living in Missouri are also more likely to experience severe maternal morbidity, a term used to describe acute conditions that either cause death or create short or long-term health complications, the report found (a rate of 220 per 10,000 live births compared to 89 per 10,000 live births among white women). Read more
Historical / Cultural
Black Historians, Race, and the Historical Profession. By Hettie Williams / AAIHS
Carter G. Woodson Mural on 9th St NW, Washington, D.C, May 26, 2005 (Wikimedia Commons)
“History must restore what slavery took away, for it is the social damage of slavery that the present generations must repair and offset,” states Arthur A. Schomburg in his essay, “The Negro Digs Up His Past,” published in Survey Graphic in 1925. Closed out of the archive and prominent institutions of higher education in the post-Emancipation Era, the first Black historians were ordinary people and autodidacts such as William Wells Brown and George Washington Williams, identified by Stephen A. Hall in his important text A Faithful Account of the Race. These men and women were soon followed by a generation of highly educated Black professional historians, including Anna Julia Cooper, W.E.B. Du Bois, Carter G. Woodson, Rayford Logan, Dorothy Porter Wesley, Merze Tate, and Marion Thompson Wright. Read more
Panel says West Point, Naval Academy should scrub Confederate names. By Julia Mueller / The Hill
The congressional Naming Commission on Monday released a new report recommending the removal of Confederate figures’ names from military schools. The panel’s report suggested that the West Point U.S. Military Academy and the U.S. Naval Academy rename landmarks and structures that commemorate Robert E. Lee and other Confederate officers. Seven Department of Defense (DOD) assets were flagged for renaming at West Point. Five of them were named after Lee, including a barracks and a child development center. Three assets were flagged at the Naval Academy, including an engineering building and the superintendent’s quarters. Read more
Counties with more slaves in 1860 have higher gun ownership rates today, study finds. By Matthew Rozsa / Salon
A new study finds a peculiar correlation between rate of enslavement in the past and firearm ownership now
Though the Civil War was over 150 years ago, the social fabric of the United States still suffers from the country’s former divisions. Cultural and political values are split between the so-called free counties and the former slave counties, which existed in 15 states (only 11 of which seceded during the Civil War). Now, a new study has shown one of the most peculiar, yet perhaps unsurprising, divisions between former slaveholding and free parts of the U.S.: the prevalence of slavery in a given county correlates closely to the prevalence of firearms owned by its residents. Read more
Race, Welfare Reform, and the Push for Family Values. By Trumaine Mitchell / AAIHS
National Welfare Rights Organization Rally, September 8, 1971 (Library of Congress)
American political culture’s preoccupation with regulating women’s reproductive rights as a means of promoting family values correlates to welfare reform measures in the late twentieth century. Believing welfare dependency to be a major contributor to out-of-wedlock births among poor Black women, conservatives and liberals in the 1980s and 1990s argued that restricting their access to benefits would compel them to build stable nuclear families. In this way, politicians and policymakers, under the banner of family values, used welfare reform to limit poor Black women’s reproductive choices. Read more
A Tiny House in Manhattan Has a Link to the Underground Railroad. By Juhn Freeman Gill / NYT
Before it was a clothing store, it was a bar, and before it was a bar, it was a key part of American history.
Less well known, however, is 2 White Street’s antebellum incarnation as a destination of a very different kind: the home of a prominent Black abolitionist minister and a possible stop on the Underground Railroad, the network of Black and white activists who helped African Americans flee Southern slavery before the Civil War. From 1842 until his death in 1847, Rev. Theodore S. Wright lived in the house, helping conduct fugitives to freedom in more-Northern parts of the country or Canada. Read more
Related: Man unknowingly buys former plantation house where his ancestors were enslaved. CBS News
How Emmett Till’s Death Led to the Invention of the “Liberal Media.” By Chris Lamb / The Nation
The young Black man’s murder is an outrage that still haunts our history. So do the lies in the media set in motion by the discovery of his mutilated body 67 years ago today.
Sixty-seven years ago, right-wing journalists in the South used what would later be called fake news and misinformation to distort the facts of the Till story to appeal to the racism and fanaticism of their readers. This continues to be a winning formula for the far-right, whether it’s demonizing immigrants and other minorities, parroting Trumpian lies, perpetuating the fraudulent claims of a stolen 2020 presidential election, or whitewashing the insurrection at the US Capitol on January 6, 2021. Read more
Meet the man who helped Michael K. Williams tell his story. By Scott Neumyer / Andscape
Jon Sternfeld talks about working with the actor on his memoir, ‘Scenes From My Life’
When Jon Sternfeld received a call from Michael K. Williams’ agent in 2018 about potentially working on the actor’s memoir, he was, of course, excited about the opportunity. But Sternfeld couldn’t have imagined that, four years later, the Emmy-nominated actor wouldn’t be alive to see his story hit bookshelves. Nearly a year after Williams died of an accidental drug overdose on Sept. 6, 2021, the book, Scenes From My Life: A Memoir emerges as what will likely be seen as the final word on his life — a responsibility that Sternfeld, the actor’s co-author, doesn’t take lightly. Read more
Bad Bunny makes history, winning VMA artist of the year. By Christopher Brito / CBS News
Bad Bunny has won artist of the year at MTV’s Video Music Awards on Sunday night — becoming the first non-English-language performer to win the title, according to the L.A. Times. The reggaeton superstar learned of his win while holding a concert at Yankee Stadium in the Bronx. NBA veteran and fellow Puerto Rican Carmelo Anthony handed over the Moonman trophy to Bad Bunny after he was announced the winner. Drake, Ed Sheeran, Harry Styles, Lil Naz X, Lizzo and Jack Harlow were the other nominees. Read more
Mattel honors Madam C.J. Walker with a Barbie. By Zoe Sottile / CNN
Madam. C.J. Walker, the first self-made female millionaire in the U.S., is the next female role model to be honored in Barbie’s line of Inspiring Women dolls.
Sports
Is Serena Williams the GOAT? Yes. No. Probably. Maybe. Without a Doubt. By Christopher Clarey / NYT
Proclaiming the 23-time Grand Slam singles champion the greatest women’s tennis player of all time is a worthwhile debate, but not a straightforward one. First, define greatness.
A successful Black woman in a predominantly white sport, she has beaten the odds, and talented opponents from multiple generations, across four decades. She has swatted aces and baseline winners, hustled for drop shots, lunged for returns and scrapped back from adversity on and off the court with the sort of sustained tenacity and triumph that only transcendent champions can muster. As she bids farewell, emotions are rightly running high, yet to unreservedly proclaim her the GOAT (greatest of all time) in women’s tennis is not as straightforward as a short overhead into an open court. Read more
Related: Without big sister Venus, the Serena Williams story could never be told. By Ava Wallace / Wash Post
Related: What Serena Williams means to Black women. By Ava Wallace / Wash Post
Deion Sanders: Jackson State in ‘crisis mode’ amid city’s water emergency. By Glynn A. Hill / Wash Post
Days before its season opener Sunday, Jackson State’s football team is relocating its players and practices as Mississippi’s capital city grapples with multiple water crises, Coach Deion Sanders said Tuesday.
“We [were] hit with a little crisis in the city of Jackson. We don’t have water,” Sanders said in a social media post. “Water means we don’t have air conditioning, we can’t use toilets, we don’t have water therefore we don’t have ice, which pretty much places a burden on the program. So right now we’re operating in crisis mode.” Read more
Vanessa Bryant awarded $16 million in civil suit over crash photos. By Gus Garcia-Roberts / Wash Post
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