Featured
The ugly history behind those border agents chasing Haitian migrants on horseback. By Julia Craven / Slate
As Haitian migrants carrying food, shoes, and other necessities began to wade into the waters of the Rio Grande earlier this month, some were greeted on American soil by Border Patrol agents mounted on horseback. Photographs and videos captured the scene: officers chasing migrants back into the water, grabbing migrants by their shirts or in some cases swinging reins in a way that mimicked makeshift whips.
Hoping to put this moment in proper historical context, I called Monica Martinez, an associate professor at the University of Texas at Austin and a historian of racist violence in the U.S. We spoke about her research on 20th century border abuses, the Texas Rangers in particular, and why she believes the conversations around anti-Black racism and immigration need to be merged. Read more
Political / Social
How voter suppression laws hurt White people. By John Blake / CNN
Critics often describe the wave of voter restriction laws sweeping the nation as a new version of Jim Crow, the 19th century minstrel figure whose stage name became the symbol of a brutal era of Black oppression. But if you want to understand how these new voter restriction laws also oppress White people, it’s more useful to invoke another cultural figure: Wile E. Coyote.
This comparison is not designed to make light of voter suppression, which is an alarming attack on our democracy. It’s to make a point that doesn’t get emphasized enough as Democrats approach a crucial stretch in their efforts to pass a new voting rights bill: White people — not just people of color — have been some of the biggest victims of voter suppression tactics. Read more
The World Lost a Great Philosopher This Week. By Jamelle Bouie / NYT
Mills’s most famous work, “The Racial Contract,” published in 1997, is both an addition to and critique of the social contract tradition within Western political theory. It is an addition in that Mills, following the classic contractarians — Thomas Hobbes, John Locke, Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Immanuel Kant — attempts to use the conceit of a social contract to “explain the actual genesis of the society and the state, the way society is structured, the way the government functions, and people’s moral psychology.” Read more
When a White-majority neighborhood wants to divorce its Black city. By Brandon Tensley / CNN
The combustible, decades-long debate over Buckhead shines a light on a broader racial reality in the US. “Today, you really have two kinds of racial residential segregation,” Stephen Menendian, the assistant director and director of research at UC Berkeley’s Othering and Belonging Institute and the lead author of a June report on racial residential segregation in the 21st century, told CNN. “Within large cities, you have racially identifiable neighborhoods and schools. You also have suburbs that are White and affluent, and then suburbs that are heavily non-White and much poorer.” Read more
Asian American lawmakers urge DOJ to give updates about hate crimes law. By Cynthia Silva / NBC News
Two Asian American lawmakers are asking the Justice Department for updates on the Covid-19 Hate Crimes Act signed four months ago. Sen. Mazie Hirono, D-Hawaii, and Rep. Grace Meng, D-N.Y., sent a letter Monday to Attorney General Merrick Garland urging the implementation of key provisions of the act that are “critical to its effectiveness.” The letter — which highlights the increased violence toward older Asians and the Atlanta-area spa shootings that killed eight people, six of whom were women of Asian descent — follows a recent FBI report that showed that the number of hate crimes last year was the highest in more than a decade. Read more
Related: How It Feels to Be Asian in Today’s America. By NYT
Pennsylvania school district reverses ban on books by authors of color after students fought back. By Mirna Alsharif and Liam Reilly / CNN
A southern Pennsylvania school board has reversed its decision to ban anti-racism books and resources. The Central York school board unanimously approved the reinstatement of a list of anti-racism books and resources, effective immediately, spokeswoman Julie Randall Romig confirmed to CNN. The reversal comes a week after a student protest and a heated virtual school board meeting about the “diversity resource list” that was banned from the curriculum by the board last year. Read more
Related: Here’s what Black students have to say about ‘critical race theory’ bans. By Char Adams / NBC News
Related: A win for white power at a school board meeting in Grapevine, Tex. By Karen Attiah / Wash Post
Republicans prove they never really wanted police reform. They’re on the wrong side of history. By Eugene Robinson / Wash Post
The Republicans chose as their lead negotiator Sen. Tim Scott (S.C.), the only African American GOP senator. Scott has spoken with some eloquence about his own mistreatment by police. At times I’ve entertained the possibility that he might actually be sincere in wanting to get a reform bill passed. The cynical and misleading statement he released Wednesday, however, disabused me of any such notion. Read more
UN Durban meeting on race skipped by US, UK and others. By Caitlin Hu / CNN
Rep. Karen Bass plans to announce run for mayor of Los Angeles. By Sean Sullivan and Tyler Pager / Wash Post
Rep. Karen Bass (D-Calif.) is planning to announce that she will run for mayor of Los Angeles in 2022, according to two people with knowledge of the situation, joining a high-stakes race to run the second-most populous city in the country. The people, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe private deliberations, said an official announcement is expected soon. It will possibly happen next week, barring unexpected changes, they said. Read more
These families of missing Black people are frustrated with the lack of response to their cases. By Nicquel Terry Ellis / CNN
“You wish you lived in a world where everything was equal but it’s really not equal,” Robinson told CNN. Robinson is among the Black and brown families whose loved ones remain missing and say they have struggled to get fair attention on their cases. Some say they have grown frustrated with watching the search for missing White women like Petito be in the spotlight, while police appear to allow their cases to go cold or classify their loved one as a “runaway.” Shown is Daniel Robinson, who went missing after leaving a work site in the desert in his Jeep Renegade on June 23. Read more
Blackness and Latinidad are not mutually exclusive. Here’s what it means to be Afro-Latino in America. By Amir Vera and Alexander Pineda / CNN
Joel Alvarado was 6 years old when his mother pulled him aside and asked him to be discreet as he was getting ready to meet his grandmother in Puerto Rico. “She made me aware that my grandmother was much darker than my other relatives, especially from her side of the family, and she didn’t want me to say anything out of turn or something about her skin color,” said Alvarado.
In the last decade, the number of people across the US who identify as Black and Hispanic has increased 11.6%, according to a CNN analysis of census data. The national debate around race along with a growing trend of young Black Latinos embracing their roots in a way that older generations may have not are some of the factors behind the uptick, experts say. Read more
What slavery reparations from the federal government could look like. By P. R. Lockhart / NBC News
After decades of work from activists pushing the issue, presidential candidates, Congress members, local governments and private institutions have debated whether and how the federal government should issue reparations for Black Americans who are descendants of slaves. As the Biden administration promises to confront structural racism and inequality, a growing number of Democratic lawmakers have given their support to H.R. 40, a decades-old bill first introduced by Rep. John Conyers, D-Mich., in 1989. The bill would create a commission to study slavery and discrimination in the United States and potential reparations proposals for restitution. In April, H.R. 40 moved out of committee for the first time, potentially setting up a floor vote on the legislation. Read more
Louisiana state trooper charged in pummeling of Black man. By Jake Bleiberg and Jim Mustian / AP and Wash Post
A former Louisiana State Police trooper has been charged with a civil rights violation for pummeling a Black motorist 18 times with a flashlight — the first criminal case to emerge from federal investigations into troopers’ beatings of at least three Black men. A grand jury on Thursday indicted Jacob Brown for the 2019 beating following a traffic stop that left Aaron Larry Bowman with a broken jaw, broken ribs and a gash to his head. Brown was charged with one count of deprivation of rights under color of law, federal prosecutors said. Read more
Historical / Cultural
In 1865, thousands of Black South Carolinians signed a 54-foot-long freedom petition. By Michael E. Ruane / Wash Post
Civil rights lessons from 1961 influence 2021. The fight is not over. By Nicole Carroll / USA Today
Nearly every few weeks in 1961, there were battles for voting rights and integrating schools, businesses and libraries. Our team focused on seven crucial days, interviewing those who lived through the protests, asking them to share their stories in their own words. Reporters also sought out those who helped in the background, like the people who fed, housed and drove the protesters. “It happened to be a year when a whole lot happened,” Berry said. “Especially with SNCC going into places like Mississippi, especially with other groups going into places like southwest Georgia. The more we talked to veterans, they talked about what they did in ’61 and how that influenced things later on. So it became a good year to look at.” Read more
The Betrayal of Historically Black Colleges. By Katherine Mangan / The Chronicle of Higher Education
For decades, states have been funding their white campuses while starving their Black ones. In Tennessee, that could finally change. Tennessee State’s president, Glenda Baskin Glover, said she noticed, soon after taking office, in 2013, that the matching money her university should have been receiving was absent from the state budget. She contacted Love, and together they pushed to get an accounting of how much money the campus had been shorted. By Love’s calculation, TSU was shortchanged $544 million in land-grant funding over six decades. Some lawmakers were incredulous at that number. The first thing some ask, he said, is, “‘Are you sure this is right?’ Then they ask, ‘How did this happen?’” The answer, Love told them, was at least in part that the state wasn’t committed to educating Black people. Read more
Monument honoring abolition of slavery unveiled in Virginia. By Christopher Brito / CBS News
A monument dedicated to the abolition of slavery was unveiled in Richmond, Virginia, on Wednesday, two weeks after a statue of Confederate General Robert E. Lee was taken down 2 miles away. The Emancipation and Freedom Monument portrays two 12-foot bronze statues of a man, a woman and an infant after being freed from slavery. The woman is holding the child and a piece of paper with the January 1, 1863, date — the day when President Abraham Lincoln signed the Emancipation Proclamation. The man is shown having whip scars and appears to be breaking free from shackles. Read more
Remembering Virginia’s ‘Forgotten 14.’ By A. Donald McEachin / Wash Post
U.S. history is plagued with untold stories of forgotten heroes. Approximately 180,000 African Americans served in the Union Army during the Civil War. Known as United States Colored Troops (USCT), they were essential to Union victory, yet Americans remain largely unaware of their role during the war. There were more than 5,500 African American men who enlisted in my home state of Virginia, and thousands more were native Virginians who enlisted at locations outside the Old Dominion. Most Virginia USCTs were previously enslaved and had escaped by crossing Union lines in Tidewater and Northern Virginia, areas occupied by the Union Army for most of the war. In January 2020, the Richmond City Council unanimously approved construction on the state capital’s famous Monument Avenue of a new monument honoring 14 African American Medal of Honor recipients, known as the “Forgotten 14,” for their role in the Battle of New Market Height. Read more
National Cathedral replacing Confederate glass with racial justice imagery. By LI Cohen / CBS News
Historic Black cemetery buried below parking lot at center of legal dispute. By Erik Ortiz / NBC News
In the shadow of a 15-story apartment complex overlooking a suburb of Washington, D.C., an asphalt-paved parking lot is at the heart of a development dispute. The conflict is over what community members in Montgomery County, Maryland, say lie inconspicuously below: potentially hundreds of bodies of freed slaves and their descendants, buried in what was once a cemetery in the early 20th century. “These are people who were so oppressed and so discarded and so disrespected in life, and now, even in death, they meet the same fate,” said Marsha Coleman-Adebayo, president of the Bethesda African Cemetery Coalition, which formed in 2019 and whose members are seeking to preserve what is known as the Moses African Cemetery. Read more
Bringing Black History to Life in the Great Outdoors. By James Edward Mills / NYT
The Latino family of Sylvia Mendez were pivotal in the desegregation fight. By Raul A. Reyes / NBC News
As a little girl in Westminster, California, in 1945, Sylvia Mendez yearned to attend the “beautiful school” with the “nice playground” where the school bus deposited her every morning. But the 9-year-old wasn’t allowed in that school — because she was Mexican American. When her parents mounted a legal challenge to the school district’s segregation practices, she found herself at the center of Mendez v. Westminster School District of Orange County. The lawsuit helped bring about the end of school segregation in California. It also paved the way for the Brown v. Board of Education decision at the U.S. Supreme Court, which found segregation in public schools unconstitutional. Read more
Woodie King Jr. finally gets a Tony Award for bringing color to the stage. By Jeremy Gerard / The Undefeated
New Federal Theatre founder is honored for a lifetime of discovering talent. Each time an insistent musicality peeked through the verbiage of an embryonic work, King would make sure his latest protégé was seen and heard even while he kept a low profile pulling strings from the back office. Perhaps that will change on Sunday, when Broadway’s establishment belatedly acknowledges King’s contribution to American theater over the past six decades with a special Tony Honors for Excellence in Theatre award. The medallion takes on greater meaning when one realizes that King’s name has never been spelled out in either light bulbs or pixels on a Broadway marquee. Read more
Related: Gabrielle Union calls out Hollywood’s pay inequity for actors of color. By Megan Stone / GMA
Melvin Van Peebles wrote the do-it-yourself playbook for Black filmmakers. By Will Haygood / Wash Post
Metropolitan Opera season to open with first opera by Black composer. By AP and NBC News
Charles Blow recalls being in the audience at the premiere of the opera based on his memoir, “Fire Shut Up in My Bones,” and watching the scene that depicts his sexual abuse as a child by an older cousin. More history-making is the fact that “Fire,” with a score by jazz trumpeter and composer Terence Blanchard, will be the first opera by a Black musician presented at the Met in its 138 years. “Of course you’re filled with pride to be labeled with that,” Blanchard said after a rehearsal last week. “But there’s a certain sense of, not guilt, but sorrow, because I know I’m not the first who was qualified.” Read more
Michael K. Williams died of accidental overdose, medical examiner says. By Sophie Reardon and Victoria Albert / CBS News
Michael K. Williams died of an accidental overdose, the New York City Chief Medical Examiner’s office announced Friday. The Emmy-nominated actor, best known for his role in “The Wire,” was found dead at his Brooklyn home earlier this month. The 54-year-old’s cause of death was “acute intoxication by the combined effects of fentanyl, p-fluorofentanyl, heroin and cocaine,” the medical examiner’s office said. The office said the manner of death was an accident. Read more
Afro-Latinas sing to the santos, the ancestors, and the culture. By Denise Oliver Velez / Daily Kos
The African diaspora in the New World is large and varied. In Brazil alone, Afro-descendants number 91 million, with roots in both Central and West Africa and a wide variation in musical styles. Many of the lyrics and drum patterns call out to deities who are not Catholic, Protestant, nor Muslim—deities and spirits who survived a deathly middle passage, to be born again in music on the soil of the islands in the Caribbean, and on the mainland of Mexico as well as Central and South America. This will be the first time in this 19-month-old series all the songs I’ve selected will not be in English. However, these rhythms, with harmonies in Spanish, Brazilian Portuguese, and Haitian Creole need no translation: They communicate directly to our spirits. Read more
Sports
University suspends sorority over slide show critiquing Black football players’ features: ‘We abhor racism.’ By Jaclyn Peiser / Wash Post
A predominantly Black football team protested in a White Kentucky community. It worked out fine. By Steven Godfrey / Wash Post
D.C.-area attorney Tamika Tremaglio to replace Michele Roberts as National Basketball Players Association leader. By Ben Golliver / Wash Post
The National Basketball Players Association’s long-anticipated regime change is complete. D.C.-area attorney Tamika Tremaglio was named the NBPA’s next executive director, replacing Michele Roberts, who will retire at year’s end. Tremaglio will work alongside Portland Trail Blazers guard CJ McCollum, who succeeded Chris Paul as union president last month. “I’ve broken barriers, challenged misperceptions, and much like the professional athletes I’ve supported over the years, I have defied the odds,” Tremaglio said in a statement. “I’m incredibly grateful and passionate about this opportunity to serve the players.” Read more
Deshaun Watson’s status remains muddled, and the NFL seems content to wait it out. By Candace Buckner / Wash Post
While Watson, the fourth-highest-paid player in the most-watched American league, faces a criminal investigation and 22 civil lawsuits from women who claim he harassed or assaulted them during massages, the NFL sits and waits. Maybe for the conclusion of the league’s own investigation into the matter, led by Lisa Friel, a former chief of the Sex Crimes Prosecution Unit in the Manhattan District Attorney’s Office. Maybe for a Harris County grand jury to determine whether there’s enough evidence to bring criminal charges against Watson. Read more
NBA Anti-Vaxxers Are Pushing Around the League–It’s Working. By Matt Sullivan / RollingStone
The NBA had relied on science above all to lead the sports world through the Covid nightmare, from the league’s outbreak-driven shutdown to a pandemic-proof playoff bubble in Disney World to game after game with fans back in the stands. But after two plagued seasons of non-stop nasal swabbing, quarantining and distrust, unvaccinated players were pushing back. They made their case to the union summit: There should be testing this year, of course, just not during off-days. They’d mask up on the court and on the road, if they must. But no way would they agree to a mandatory jab. The vaccine deniers had set the agenda; the players agreed to take their demands for personal freedom to the NBA’s negotiating table. Read more
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