Featured
The Perils and Promise of America’s Third Reconstruction. By Pennel E. Joseph / Time
The First Reconstruction era, 1865 to 1898, was followed by decades of Jim Crow, with its mendacious principle of “separate but equal.” The Second Reconstruction spanned the heroic period of the civil rights era— from the 1954, Supreme Court decision in Brown v. Board of Education to Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s April 4, 1968, assassination.
In our time we have come to the Third Reconstruction, the period from the election of Barack Obama as president in 2008 through the recent Black Lives Matter (BLM) protests and all that they have entailed. America can finally shed the tragic history it has remained enthralled by for almost two centuries, or choose the path of multiracial democracy that can save the national soul. We have, just as we did during two earlier periods of reconstruction, a grave moral and political choice to make. I choose hope. Adapted from Peniel E. Joseph’s new book The Third Reconstruction: America’s Struggle for Racial Justice in the Twenty-First Century. Read more
Political / Social
How the Second Civil War Could Start. By Major Garrett and David Becker / The Bulwark
The potential U.S. descent into violence, mutual suspicion, and even dissolution. In the following excerpt from The Big Truth: Upholding Democracy in the Age of “The Big Lie”, on sale today, authors Major Garrett and David Becker imagine a grim scenario for the next two years of U.S. politics.]
America’s second civil war could start with a bang or with a whimper. It could begin with a skirmish or sneak up on us through a series of small compromises and acts of political cowardice. Civil war could announce itself loudly and bloodily, leaving no doubt as to its awful entrance. Or it could creep in through the back door, only to be recognized in hindsight as a series of seemingly disconnected events that could have and should have been stopped. We may be midstream in such a flow of events already. We now examine this possible future as if we have just emerged from its aftermath. Read more
What Stacey Abrams is really doing in Georgia. By Dahlia Lithwick / Slate
And why her race for governor is only one small part of her project. The following is adapted from Lady Justice: Women, the Law, and the Fight to Save America, by our own Dahlia Lithwick. The book is available now. Published by arrangement with Penguin Press, a member of Penguin Random House LLC. Copyright © 2022 by Dahlia Lithwick.
If Stacey Abrams had prevailed when she ran for governor of Georgia in 2018, she would have become the nation’s first female African American governor and likely gone on to become a household name in politics. But Abrams lost that race—and is now easily one of the most recognizable thinkers and activists in the country. Read more
Poll: Personal and national factors collide in tight Georgia Senate race. By Fred Backus, Jennifer De Pinto , Anthony Salvanto and Kabir Khanna / CBS News
In all, the new CBS News Battleground Tracker poll in Georgia shows incumbent Warnock with a slight two-point edge over Walker.
It’s the personal vs. the partisan in Georgia’s Senate race, where the candidates are close in support, but voters’ rationales for supporting each of them are quite different. Democratic Sen. Raphael Warnock has better favorable ratings and character measures, while GOP challenger Herschel Walker’s voters have eyes on Washington and a chance for a Republican Senate. Read more
Former federal prosecutor: A “day of reckoning” is coming for Trump — but he’s not going to jail. By Chauncey Devega / Salon
Kenneth McCallion battled Trump in court — and says Merrick Garland has “overwhelming evidence” for conviction
McCallion is a former Justice Department prosecutor who also worked for the New York State Attorney General’s office as a prosecutor on Trump racketeering cases. As an assistant U.S. attorney and special assistant U.S. attorney, he focused on international fraud and counterintelligence cases that often involved Russian organized crime. McCallion is also the author of several books, including “Profiles in Cowardice in the Trump Era” and “Treason & Betrayal: The Rise and Fall of Individual-1.” In this wide-ranging conversation, he offers his view that Donald Trump, along with his inner circle and his businesses, operate like an organized crime family. McCallion says these attributes and behavior help to explain Trump’s affinity for foreign demagogues and other corrupt elements, including Eastern European and Russian criminal organizations. Read more
Supreme Court affirmative action cases could affect workplace next. By John Fritze / USA Today
The high court is considering challenges to the use of race in admission policies at Harvard and the University of North Carolina. “There absolutely will be spillover,” a law professor said.
Though the questions raised by the litigation are limited to higher education, experts say that a broad ruling that curbs affirmative action on American campuses could have a ripple effect on diversity and inclusion programs that have proliferated in the private sector, especially since the emergence of the Black Lives Matter movement. Read more
Related: Former UNC-Chapel Hill student accuses faculty of racial discrimination. By Char Adams / NBC News
State Investigation Reveals Racial Disparities in Student Discipline and Police Involvement. By Jodi S. Cohen and Jennifer Smith Richards / ProPublica
The Illinois civil rights probe of the state’s largest high school district comes after ProPublica and the Chicago Tribune documented thousands of police tickets issued to students for minor infractions.
At Illinois’ largest high school district, Black and Latino students were suspended more often than white students, disciplined more often for subjective reasons like dress code violations, and referred more frequently to the local police, who in many cases then issued costly tickets for misbehavior, data submitted as part of a state investigation shows. Read more
Jackson water crisis spurs calls to bring the federal hammer down on Mississippi. By Annie Snider / Politico
Advocates say the long-running problems at Jackson’s troubled water plant show the largely Black city has been neglected by the Republican-controlled state government.
Advocacy groups that see racial bias as a major cause of the water crisis in Jackson, Miss., are debating new strategies for taking the Republican-controlled state government out of the lead role when it comes to steering federal spending in its capital city. Those tactics could include filing a federal civil rights complaint accusing the state of shortchanging the Black-majority city of 150,000 people when distributing federal water infrastructure dollars. Another option under consideration, people involved in the discussions said, is getting Congress to steer additional water funding to Jackson without Mississippi’s involvement — a sharp change from the central role states traditionally play in distributing these kinds of dollars. Read more
Where do Latino voters stand on abortion? Just about everywhere. By Nicole Narea / Vox
Latinos are religious — but that doesn’t mean they’re anti-abortion
A common misconception is that because such a large proportion of the Latino population is Christian, Latinos are more likely to oppose abortion. Pollsters and strategists for both parties say that’s a myth for three reasons: Latinos aren’t as Christian as they once were, most Latinos don’t belong to Christian sects that advocate for political anti-abortion policies, and there are numerous factors beyond religion that shape Latino views on abortion. Read more
George Floyd Killing: Ex-Officer Lane Gets Three Years In Prison. By Madeline Halpert / Forbes
Former Minneapolis police officer Thomas Lane was sentenced to three years in prison as a part of a plea deal for his involvement in the killing of George Floyd in 2020, which sparked nationwide protests over police brutality and racial justice.
Lane—a white man who helped restrain Floyd, a Black man who was killed in May 2020 when Lane’s colleague Derek Chauvin pinned him to the ground with his knee on his neck for nine and a half minutes—pleaded guilty to a charge of aiding and abetting second-degree manslaughter in May. Read more
DNA test databases lack diversity, hinder search for missing children. By N’dea Yancey-Bragg, Sasha Ndisabiye and Rachel Looker / USA Today
In recent years, advocacy groups and law enforcement have turned to DNA analysis as a new tool to search for longtime missing children like Raymond. But complicated rules limiting the amount of genetic material police can search combined with a lack of diversity in the largest commercial databases means this new technology isn’t living up to its potential for missing people of color. Read more
Ethics / Morality / Religion
Biden includes faith leaders in summit’s charge to ‘rise together against hate.’ By Adelle M. Banks / RNS
In the audience were survivors and family members of those lost to violence at houses of worship and other scenes of hate crimes.
Citing the murders of a Sikh man and a Black churchgoer on the anniversaries of their killings, President Biden, at a White House summit Thursday (Sept. 15), addressed hate-fueled violence, committing to new and renewed measures to combat hate, including attacks aimed at people of faith. Read more
Most Republicans Support Declaring the United States a Christian Nation. By Stella Rouse and Shibley Telhami / Politico
Appeals to Christian nationalism have a long tradition in American history, though they have usually operated on the fringes
Christian nationalism, a belief that the United States was founded as a white, Christian nation and that there is no separation between church and state, is gaining steam on the right. The increasingly mainstream appearance of this belief in GOP circles makes sense if you look at new public opinion surveys. Our new University of Maryland Critical Issues Poll suggests that declaring the United States a Christian nation is a message that could be broadly embraced by Republicans in the midterms and 2024 presidential race. But our findings also see limits to its appeal — and over the long-term, Christian nationalism could be a political loser. Read more
Related: Mixing Christianity With Nationalism Is a Recipe for Fascism. By Ed Kilgore / New York Magazine
‘Honk for Jesus’ provides an uncomfortable reflection of the Black church. By Candice Marie Benbow / NCR
Regina Hall and Sterling K. Brown star in “Honk for Jesus. Save Your Soul.”
When “Honk for Jesus. Save Your Soul.” premiered in theaters and on Peacock on Sept. 2, many had no choice but to say “ouch.” The dark comedy, starring Regina Hall and Sterling K. Brown, is supposed to be satirical in its depiction of a megachurch pastor and his wife as they attempt to resurrect themselves after a fall from grace. Yet the greatest strength of this “mockumentary” is that it’s not parody at all — rather, it’s one of the most accurate depictions of contemporary Black church culture I’ve seen. Read more
Private Religious Schools Have Public Responsibilities Too. By Nomi M. Stolzenberg and David N. Myers / The Atlantic
Communities of faith should be able to pass on their traditions, but must still meet basic state educational standards.
Is it permissible for private schools in this country to disregard state standards of proficiency in English, math, and U.S. history? This is the question at the heart of a recent wide-ranging investigative report from The New York Times. The article focuses on the Hasidic educational system in New York, whose students almost uniformly fail state standardized tests in reading and math. A key nub of controversy is the fact that Hasidic schools in New York receive massive public financial support—$1 billion over the past four years—even though school administrators are openly defiant of the state’s requirement that they educate their students to a bare minimum in secular studies. Read more
Historical / Cultural
Reckoning with the Slave Ship Clotilda. By Vera Caruthers / The New Yorker
A new documentary tells the story of the last known slave ship to enter the United States and takes on the difficult question of how to memorialize America’s history of racial violence.
In Margaret Brown’s documentary “Descendant,” a man named Anderson Flen walks through the streets of Montgomery, Alabama, and wonders aloud about the people who walked there before him, people who had less freedom and fewer opportunities. He’s from Africatown, a freed Black settlement on the Gulf Coast, founded by people who were brought over on the Clotilda, the last known slave ship to reach the United States. Flen, who is seventy-two, is working with community members and preservationists to transform Africatown into a tourist destination that honors the legacy of enslaved Black people. Read more
Online Forum–Fannie Lou Hamer’s Enduring Message to America. By AAIHS Editors
Coinciding with the 105th anniversary of Fannie Lou Hamer’s birthday (October 6, 1917), Black Perspectives is collaborating with the Journal of Civil and Human Rights** to host an online roundtable on Keisha N. Blain’s highly acclaimed book, Until I am Free: Fannie Lou Hamer’s Enduring Message to America (Beacon Press, 2021).
Recently released in paperback, Until I am Free is a blend of social commentary, biography, and intellectual history. The book was nominated for an NAACP Image Award and selected as a finalist for the 2022 National Book Critics Circle Award and the 2021 Hooks National Book Award. It was also selected as one of the best history books by Smithsonian Magazine in 2021. Read more
Ibram X. Kendi encourages kids to ask difficult questions about U.S. history. By Jonathan Capehart Podcast / Wash Post
In this Washington Post Live conversation from Sept. 14, historian and best-selling author Ibram X. Kendi discusses his new children’s book, “Magnolia Flower,” what inspired him to adapt the writing of Zora Neale Hurston and why the latest push to ban books isn’t new. Listen here
Sesame Street’ has its first Black female puppeteer. By Sydney Page / Wash Post
Megan Piphus Peace, who until last month was working as a real estate developer, joined the cast of the longtime children’s show
In June 2020, Piphus Peace made history by becoming the first Black woman to be a puppeteer performer on “Sesame Street,” and the following year, she became a full-time cast member on Season 52 of the show. She plays Gabrielle, a 6-year-old Black girl who first appeared in the series in 2017. Before Piphus Peace started playing Gabrielle, a child actress performed the voice of the character. Read more
Abbott Elementary’ is the rare sitcom with something for everyone. By Inkoo Kang / Wash Post
Network comedy’s best cast returns for another school year after its big night at the Emmys
On “Abbott” — named after the underfunded school where the series is set — teachers put on happy or hopeful or encouraging faces for their (mostly Black) students, and sometimes even for each other, while knowing they’re set up to fail by the larger educational apparatus. “Welcome to the Philly public school system,” says a veteran teacher in the new season, “where you never have what you need.” The jobs of educators aren’t merely to instruct, but to never let on to their young charges how powerless they sometimes feel, nor their awareness of how much students have to go without. Read more
Sports
“Unusual to Have…”- 42-Year-Old Venus Williams Makes a Delightful Confession About Sister Serena Williams. By Aditya R. Menon / Essentially Sports
The former world no.1, Venus Williams, isn’t shy about sharing her love for her sister with her fans or the media. A 7-time Grand Slam winner, Venus has the most delightful relationship with her younger sister, Serena Williams. In a recent interview, Venus talked about the inseparable bond that she shares with her sister and the role Serena played in shaping her tennis career. Read more
The Messy Politics of the NBA. By Jeremy Gordon / The Nation
The National Basketball Association wasn’t the first professional sports league to employ Black players, but it was the first whose Black players were consistently and obviously the best. Thanks to the singular dominance of players like Bill Russell, Elgin Baylor, and Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, who gave vocal support to civil rights and racial equality in the 1950s and ’60s, the NBA took on a progressive bent early on. Yet the league’s politics were hardly consistent, and the commitment of players like Russell, Baylor, and Abdul-Jabbar was not always shared by their successors. Read more
How the NFL blocks Black coaches. By Dave Sheinin, Michael Lee, Emily Giambalvo , Artur Galocha and Clara Ence Morse / Wash Post
Nearly two decades after the NFL enacted the Rooney Rule, teams’ hiring and firing practices still disadvantage Black coaches at every turn — and it’s getting worse, a Post investigation found.
Despite the league’s end-zone pledge to “END RACISM,” Black coaches continue to be denied top jobs in a league where nearly 60 percent of the players are Black. It is a glaring shortcoming for the NFL, one highlighted by the findings of an investigation by The Washington Post. Black coaches tend to perform about as well as White coaches, The Post found. But while White candidates are offered a vast and diverse set of routes to the league’s top coaching jobs, Black coaches face a much narrower set of paths. Read more
Coach Leonard Hamilton: ‘The Worse the Program, the More I Became Interested.’ By Billy Witz / NYT
Hamilton, the Florida State men’s basketball coach, was presented with the Joe Lapchick Character Award in New York last week.
Leonard Hamilton was on the ninth floor of the stately New York Athletic Club with its million-dollar views over Central Park, accepting the Joe Lapchick Character Award at a luncheon on Friday. Outside, a chauffeur waited to whisk him across the Hudson River to a private plane that would deliver the Florida State men’s basketball coach back to Tallahassee, Fla. Read more
Maury Wills, Master of the Stolen Base, Is Dead at 89. By Richard Goldstein / NYT
His speed (and his bat) helped the Los Angeles Dodgers win four pennants and three championships. He was voted the National League’s M.V.P. in 1962.
Maury Wills, the star Los Angeles Dodger shortstop who revived the art of base-stealing in the 1960s and became one of the most exciting ballplayers of his time, died on Monday night at his home in Sedona, Ariz. He was 89. The chants of “Go, go, go!” resounded from Dodger fans when the slender Wills took a lead off first base. He was soon off and running — stealing second base, and sometimes third moments later, spurring the usually light-hitting Dodgers to scratch out enough runs to come up winners. Read more
Las Vegas Aces Win First W.N.B.A. Championship. By Kris Rhim / NYT
The Aces shook off their reputation for being better in the regular season by holding off several rallies by the Sun. A’ja Wilson, the franchise player of the Las Vegas Aces, celebrating winning the W.N.B.A. championship on Sunday
With a championship on the line for a team with some of the W.N.B.A.’s biggest stars, the Las Vegas Aces leaned on Riquna Williams, who had scored in double digits just twice this postseason. The Aces defeated the Sun, 78-71, on Sunday to win their first W.N.B.A. championship, their postseason reflecting the regular-season dominance that led them to tie Chicago for the best record in the league. 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.