Featured
What the Air Force’s Tuskegee Airmen mishap reveals about Trump’s DEI war. By Eugene Robinson / Wash Post
The story of the Tuskegee Airmen’s service in World War II is inspiring: When skilled African American pilots, grounded because of their race, finally won the opportunity to serve their country, they fought the Nazis heroically. But last week, given the Trump administration’s order to eliminate promotion of diversity, equity and inclusion, or DEI, the Air Force promptly removed videos about the Tuskegee aviators from its basic training curriculum.
Big mistake, apparently. On Sunday, his second full day on the job, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth ordered the Air Force to resume teaching about the Tuskegee pilots, and also about the brave servicewomen who transported military aircraft to the bases where they were needed. “This has been immediately reversed,” Hegseth posted on X. But why?
I guess what was “malicious” in the way the Air Force complied with the orders of the president and the secretary of defense is that it showed how divorced from history and reality all the anti-DEI rhetoric is. Do Trump and his amen chorus really not mean to outlaw celebrating the accomplishments, and unlocking the potential, of Black people, women and other historically oppressed groups? They could have fooled me. Read more
Related: Trump Can’t Escape the Laws of Political Gravity. By Eliot A. Cohen / The Atlantic
Political / Social
Trump takes down DEI, historic civil rights law: 5 takeaways. By Phillip M. Bailey / USA Today
President Donald Trump has never been shy about his disdain for diversity programs that his conservative supporters have long said act as racial discrimination towards white Americans.
These aggressive moves could represent a major sea change that civil rights leaders warn will turn back the clock on race relations, and that progressives had warned about during the campaign despite Trump’s overtures to improve minority voter’s economic lives. Here are five takeaways from this week’s orders and what it means going forward. Read more
What has DEI actually done for U.S. workers and employers? By Megan Cerullo / CBS News
President Trump’s executive order banning diversity, equity and inclusion programs across the U.S. government is renewing debate over what DEI is and whether it has benefited workers and companies.
DEI has its roots in the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which barred employment discrimination based on race, color, sex, religion and other criteria. In the following decades, a range of policies have sought to root out bias in hiring, promote fairness in the workplace and open career pathways for people of color and for women, while also expanding to include sexual orientation and gender identity. Read more
Related: Costco DEI policies draw the ire of Republican attorneys general. Reuters and USA Today
Related: Target’s DEI cuts have Black entrepreneurs saying ‘clear the shelves.’ By Amber Ferguson / Wash Post
Conservative Crusader Played Secret Role in Spread of ‘Anti-Woke’ Schooling. By Sean Craig / The Daily Beast
PragerU—which is not an academic institution but rather a conservative content creation nonprofit—aims to “disrupt the current education system” which it calls a “left-wing propaganda machine”, according to its CEO Marissa Streit.
At last year’s Republican National Convention, the party adopted a national strategy to cut federal funding to schools “pushing critical race theory,” end teacher tenure, and reinstate Trump’s 1776 Commission that urged a national overhaul of school curricula with “patriotic education.” Read more
Related: Trump to sign sweeping executive order to expand school choice. By and
Related: South Carolina schools’ race, gender rules face civil rights lawsuit. By Anumita Kaur / Wash Post
Pete Hegseth’s Dangerous War on America. By Michael T. Klare / The Nation
Every one of Hegseth’s predecessors emphasized unity and a diverse military as key to national progress and defense.
Now in office—following a narrow 51–50 vote in the Senate—his top priorities will be to purge the officer class of anyone tainted by that “woke shit,” as he terms it, and drive women, Blacks, and LGBTQ folks out of positions of authority, or out of the military altogether. Read more
Related: Trump signs executive order taking aim at DEI programs in the military. By Ayana Archie / NPR
Related: Actually, there’s not much DEI in the DOD. By Alex Wagner / Wash Post
Donald Trump rages at Rachel Maddow: “Enemy of the people!” By Alex Bollinger / LGBTQ Nation
Donald Trump referred to out MSNBC host Rachel Maddow as “the enemy of the people,” along with the networks MSNBC and CNN.
He wrote in a post to Truth Social this weekend: “Wow! Rachel Maddow has horrible ratings. She’ll be off the air very soon. MSNBC IS CLOSE TO DEATH. CNN HAS REACHED THE BOTTOM. This is a good thing. They are the Enemy of the people!” Read more
World News
What About White Undocumented Immigrants? Critics Claim ICE Raids Are Racist. By Zack Linly / NewsOne
While Trump and his minions focus on the deportation and dehumanization of Black and Latino migrants who have crossed over the southern border, a lot of people are asking one question: What about the white immigrants? Actor Wendell Pierce, a fierce Trump critic and outspoken advocate for human rights, also posted on X that that the “mass deportation of illegal immigrants is a racist purge of the Latino and Black communities.” “Notice no raids of the Russian community in Brighton Beach or the Irish community of Boston, where known undocumented immigrants regularly live. No European immigrant communities raided,” he continued. Read more
Elon Musk urges German far-right party to overcome ‘past guilt.’ By Rachel Treisman / NPR
Fresh off a controversy over a gesture many saw as a Nazi salute, tech billionaire Elon Musk appeared virtually at a campaign event for a far-right German political party on Saturday, where he urged listeners not to be ashamed of their country’s history.
Musk — the head of President Trump’s Department of Government Efficiency — was met with roars of applause from the more than 4,000 attendees gathered in the German city of Halle as he appeared on screen at a rally for the Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) party. “I think you really are the best hope for Germany,” Musk told them. Read more
Ethics / Morality / Religion
For MAGA, the Line Between God and Donald Trump Has Blurred. By Sarah Jones / Intelligencer
Trump owes his initial rise in part to Christian nationalists, who once considered him a modern Cyrus, or a flawed vessel for God’s will. In the years since he first came to power, he has become something of a holy figure, whom many consider to be anointed by God
When he survived an assassination attempt last July, some had all the proof they needed. God’s hand was on Trump — and to oppose God’s man was to oppose God Himself. For some believers, the line between God and Trump had blurred, and now it is blurrier still, marking a new development in a much older phenomenon. A strain of Christianity embraced conservative politics — and reactionary figures — a long time ago, and Trump fulfilled its yearning for a ruthless father. In doing so, he reoriented that version of Christianity around himself until it became a cult of personality, bent on power and domination. Read more
Black ministers denounce Project 2025, urge collective Black resistance. By Adelle M. Banks / RNS
On the day after President Donald Trump was reelected, the Rev. Joseph Evans, a Berkeley School of Theology professor, wondered, along with some of his colleagues: “What are we going to do now?”
The subsequent collaboration of more than two dozen Black ministers answered with a statement, “A Credo to Legatees of the Black Church Tradition,” urging those who were raised in or now run African American congregations to defy white Christian nationalism and take acts of resistance, including investing in Black banks, supporting Black businesses and providing scholarships to help students attend vocational schools and historically Black colleges and universities. Read more
Related: The gathering force of Trump’s religious opposition. By Mark Silk / RNS
A new Supreme Court case seeks to end separation of church and state in public schools. By Ian Millhiser / Vox
The Supreme Court announced on Friday that it will hear two cases that are likely to revolutionize the relationship between church and state, at least in the context of public schools.
Both cases, known as Oklahoma Statewide Charter School Board v. Drummond and St. Isidore of Seville Catholic Virtual School v. Drummond, seek to force state governments to pay for religious public schools. They involve a planned public charter school in Oklahoma, which will be run by two Catholic dioceses. According to the Oklahoma Supreme Court, the school, known as St. Isidore, says it will “derive ‘its original characteristics and its structure as a genuine instrument of the church’ and participate ‘in the evangelizing mission of the church.’” Read more
Historical / Cultural
The Reckless Creation of Whiteness. By Erin L. Thompson / The Nation
In The Unseen Truth, Sarah Lewis examines how an erroneous 18th-century story about the “Caucasian race” led to a centuries of prejudice and misapprehension.
Americans have long been invested in an imaginary story: that whiteness stems from the mountainous region between Eastern Europe and Western Asia known as the Caucasus. In The Unseen Truth: When Race Changed Sight in America, Sarah Lewis tells the story of the origins of the “Caucasian race” and the concealment of its discrediting in the early 20th century. Lewis has written a bold intellectual history, drawing from school atlases and encyclopedias, circus sideshows, yellow journalism, and presidential files to reveal the false foundations of ideas of race that continue to shape the United States. Read more
Dred Scott — A Century After. By Fred Rodell / The Atlantic
“The Dred Scott case of 1857 is the most famous — or notorious — in all of our judicial history.”
It is the only one that every schoolboy knows by name, though rarely by its full name, which was Dred Scott v. Sandford. It is the only one that helped bring on a major war. It is one of only three decisions in 168 years of Supreme Court annals that were eventually reversed, not by the Court itself, not even, legally speaking, by war, but by amendment of the Constitution. Yet, for all the familiarity of its name and of the bare fact that it bestowed judicial blessing on the institution of slavery, the full story of the Dred Scott case is not widely known, even among lawyers. Read more
Harvard University Disbands Slavery Remembrance Program, Fires Staff. By Daniel Johnson / Black Enterprise
Harvard transferred its enslavement identification program to American Ancestors, the group leading the 10 Million Names project.
On Thursday, Jan. 23, Harvard University transferred the research component of its Slavery Remembrance Program (HSRP) to American Ancestors, a third-party partner that has helped the university conduct genealogical research related to identifying descendants of enslaved people of the university’s founders, since it began work on that project in 2022, and also fired every member of HSRP’s research staff. Read more
MLK’s ‘beloved community’ has inspired social justice work for decades − what did he mean? By Jason Oliver Evans / The Conversation
MLK Day volunteers typically perform community service that continues King’s fight to end racial discrimination and economic injustice – to build the “beloved community,” as he often said.
King does not fully explain the phrase’s meaning in his published writings, speeches and sermons. Scholars Rufus Burrow Jr. and Lewis V. Baldwin, however, argue that the beloved community is King’s principal ethical goal, guiding the struggle against what he called the “three evils of American society”: racism, economic exploitation and militarism. Read more
Heartbreak and History in a Single Color. By Alexandra Jacobs / NYT
Imani Perry’s impressionistic “Black in Blues” finds shades of meaning — beautiful and ugly — in art, artifacts, music, fashion and more.
BLACK IN BLUES: How a Color Tells the Story of My People, by Imani Perry. Imani Perry illuminates in a new book that swirls and flicks like an actual marble, a color inextricable from the Black race. Most clearly in the blues, the genre of music that evolved from spirituals and work songs and was quickly seized upon by a growing mass market, “made of sheets of sound, layered and unstable, that could make you feel much more than words,” as she writes. But in so many other realms of art and life too, often obscured from view. Read more
Sports
The Chiefs have conquered the NFL by sustaining the unsustainable. By Adam Kilgore / Wash Post
The Chiefs’ poise, strategy and execution at the end of close games have separated them from the rest of the NFL, and brought them back to the Super Bowl.
In the middle of the Kansas City Chiefs’ locker room Sunday night, rap music boomed from a giant speaker next to Patrick Mahomes’s locker. The smell of cigar smoke lingered. Mahomes gathered with fellow quarterbacks, an AFC championship hat adorned with the Super Bowl LIX logo atop his head. Before they posed for a photo, a security guard approached Mahomes and motioned for him to wait. He then thrust the Lamar Hunt Trophy into Mahomes’s hands. Mahomes held it aloft and nodded his head. Read more
Lakers give Bronny James big chance — and it doesn’t go well. By Erich Richter / NY Post
Bronny James might not be ready for the NBA quite yet.
James received some legitimate minutes in the first quarter of the Lakers’ 118-104 loss to the 76ers on Tuesday and was abused by guard Tyrese Maxey, who isolated the rookie guard at any opportunity. Bronny ended the game 0-for-5 from the floor with three turnovers in 15 minutes (four in the first quarter) and had a -9 plus/minus in the first quarter, one of the worst marks in the NBA on Tuesday. Read more
George Foreman Has No Doubt How A Muhammad Ali Rematch Would Have Ended. By Toby Morgan / SecondsOut
George Foreman is held in high regard as one of the greatest heavyweight boxers of all time.
His loss to Muhammad Ali, in an event that was billed the ‘Rumble In The Jungle’, remains one of the most memorable nights in the sport’s history. The strength and power of Foreman proved to be no match for Ali’s infamous ‘rope-a-dope’ style, which earned ‘The Greatest’ a historic eighth round knockout victory over his heavyweight rival in Zaire. Speaking on social media, ‘Big’ George shared his thoughts on what the outcome would have been in a rematch with Ali, claiming ‘The Greatest’ would have found a way to win whatever he did. Read more
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