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American Authoritarianism. By Ronald J. Sheehy, Editor / On Race in America

Authoritarianism is often portrayed as a danger that exists somewhere else—in distant nations or forgotten eras of history. Yet the American experience tells a different story. To understand the challenges confronting our democracy today, we must first recognize that authoritarian traditions have deep roots in our own past and that their consequences have long been familiar to African Americans.

Read complete essay. American Authoritarianism. By Ronald J. Sheehy, Editor / On Race in America

The Week’s Top Stories

Political / Social

Trump’s Irrationality Is Dangerous. By Tom Nichols / The Atlantic

Trump has now passed from being a stubborn narcissist to a cocooned authoritarian. Political scientists since World War II have studied the problem of “irrational” leaders, people in positions of power who seem unable to accept any version of reality that conflicts with their assumptions.

Irrational, in this sense, does not mean “stupid,” or “incompetent,” or “psychotic.” It refers more specifically to leaders who have become so trapped by their own self-regard, so isolated from the outside world, so imprisoned within their own sense of infallibility that they refuse to consider any arguments or information that conflicts with their beliefs. Read more

100 days until midterms and Democrats are winning because they actually have a message. By Lee Hartley Carter / Fox News

Democrats have organized housing, groceries, health care and child care under one affordability message

After three decades studying how people make decisions, I’ve learned that people don’t vote issue by issue. They don’t carry around a mental spreadsheet comparing tax policy, border security, energy production and education reform. They simplify. They look for one idea that helps them make sense of everything else. They’ve taken a complicated election and reduced it to one word: Affordability. Read more

Trump administration declares war on a ghost. By Evelyn Heckstein / The Conversation

The State Department on July 16, 2026, hosted what officials billed as a ministerial on the resurgence of left-wing political terrorism. Secretary of State Marco Rubio invited representatives from more than 60 countries to Washington to hear an argument that many of them appear not to believe: that a transnational far-left terrorist movement called antifa threatens the democratic world.

Antifa is not a group. There is no membership roll, no command hierarchy and no funding structure. There is no leader of antifa – the Trump administration has not named one – and there is no record of deadly attacks attributed to a U.S.-based organization called antifa. Read more

Trump’s pick for CDC director is confirmed. By Erum Salam / MS NOW

Dr. Erica Schwartz, President Donald Trump’s pick for director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, was confirmed Wednesday. This is the first time the agency has a permanent leader in a year.

Schwartz, a retired rear admiral for the Coast Guard, served as deputy surgeon general during Trump’s first term, and amid the Covid-19 pandemic. She holds a medical degree from Brown University, a law degree from the University of Maryland and a master’s degree in public health from the Uniformed Services University. Read more

What El-Sayed’s Michigan Win Reveals About Black Voters and Democrats. By Brandon Tensley / Capital B

While many observers framed the race around whether El-Sayed could break through with Black Michiganders — who account for about 20% of the state’s Democratic primary electorate — Kermit Williams said what he saw on the ground was more complex.

Williams, the political director of the Oakland Forward Action Fund, told Capital B that he noticed a clear generational divide throughout the campaign. Many older Black Michiganders, he said, embraced U.S. Rep. Haley Stevens’ message of experience, while younger and more progressive Black Michiganders were fueled by El-Sayed’s calls for deep reforms. Read more

Black Residents Warned of Abusive Cops for Years. Then Police Shot and Killed a Toddler. By Liliana Segura / The Intercept

Outside the Walmart in Senatobia, Mississippi, where police shot and killed 1-year-old Kohen Wiley, a shrine of stuffed animals sits between the garden center and the pharmacy.

In the parking lot, a cop pulled a gun on a gray Ford Fusion on a Sunday afternoon and fired while Kohen’s mother held him in the passenger’s seat. A bullet struck the child on his right side, tearing through his small body and exiting his left. The driver, who was also hit, sped to a hospital, but it was too late. At 19 months old, Kohen was dead. Read more

He’s Eligible for Up to $480,000 After Being Wrongly Imprisoned for 42 Years. The State Says No. By Richard A. Webster / Propublica

Elvis Brooks thought he had an airtight case when he applied for compensation from the state of Louisiana after he was wrongfully convicted in a fatal bar shooting that kept him in prison for more than four decades.

The 69-year-old New Orleans native has never wavered in his claims of innocence, insisting since his 1977 arrest that the cops had the wrong guy. But it would take nearly 45 years and a prosecutor admitting he failed to turn over key fingerprint evidence before the courts threw out Brooks’ conviction. Read more

Analysis says Supreme Court’s ‘colorblind’ approach has weakened Voting Rights Act. By Odafe Oghen / The Grio

The Vox report traces the doctrine from the Reagan era to recent rulings that have made it more difficult to challenge racially discriminatory election maps.

A new analysis argues Supreme Court colorblindness helped turn a once-fringe legal theory into the foundation for decisions that have weakened the Voting Rights Act and placed a higher burden on Black voters challenging discriminatory election maps. The Vox analysis, written by senior Supreme Court correspondent Ian Millhiser, traces the theory from legal debates in the 1970s to its influence on the current court. Under the colorblind constitutional theory, government action that classifies people by race is treated with suspicion even when it is intended to remedy historic discrimination. Read more

Education

‘What Are We Even Doing Here?’: New Lawsuit Challenges Ban on Race and Gender Topics at Texas A&M. By Megan Zahneis / The Chronicle of Higher Ed.

A new federal lawsuit claims that the Texas A&M University system is casting “a pall of orthodoxy” over its classrooms by canceling several courses and forcing faculty members to excise “disfavored” topics from their syllabi.

The complaint, filed Monday night in a Houston district court, challenges a system policy that prohibits advocacy of “race ideology,” “gender ideology,” and other topics in core courses. In practice, that rule has acted as a “prophylactic ban on politically disfavored speech related to race, gender, and sexual orientation,” violating professors’ First Amendment and due-process rights, according to the lawsuit. Read more

New Landmark Study Reveals HBCU Graduates Thrive Long After College—And The Data Proves Why. By Shannon Dawson / Newsone

A groundbreaking study has found that HBCU graduates enjoy remarkable long-term success, shedding light on the transformative power of our coveted educational institutions. HBCU graduates report higher well-being, belonging, and workplace engagement than national averages.

The Thurgood Marshall College Fund’s (TMCF) Dr. N. Joyce Payne Research Center has unveiled what is being hailed as the largest and most comprehensive “Proof Of Promise” study ever conducted on historically Black colleges and universities (HBCUs) alumni, and the findings paint a powerful picture of the long-term impact of an HBCU education. Read more

Douglasville teen balances football and books to score a perfect 1600 on the SAT. By Bolarinwa Oladej / The Grio

Douglasville student athlete Korry Sessoms earned a rare perfect 1600 on the SAT, balancing top academics with football as he sets his sights on Yale.

The accomplishment is exceedingly rare, with fewer than 0.05% of all test takers reaching that mark. Sessoms told the outlet he wasn’t specifically chasing perfection, but wanted to gauge where his skills stood, especially after scoring around 1570 on a practice test as the previous school year wrapped. Read more

World

‘Africa Is Not What You Think’: Black Expat Living in Tanzania Challenges Common Myths About Life on the Continent. By Gee NY / shinemycrown

A Black American woman living in Tanzania is challenging long-held misconceptions about life in Africa, using her social media platform to offer an unfiltered look at her daily experiences while urging people to rethink stereotypes about the continent.

Her video blends practical advice for people considering a move to Tanzania with candid reflections about misconceptions she frequently encounters. Read more

As the lights go out, Cuba’s true believers gather to celebrate the revolution. By Ruaridh Nicoll / The Guardian

Amid rolling blackouts, thousands come together to mark 1953 raid seen as first step to Fidel Castro taking power

It can be a struggle to find anyone who doesn’t blame Cuba’s leaders for the situation, for landing the country in a position where its future looks set to be dictated by the most careless of US presidents. But in the Plaza de la Revolución, there was no shortage of communist party faithful. They had gathered before 3am to celebrate one of the Cuban regime’s most important anniversaries – the attack on Moncada is widely seen as the opening act for the revolution – waiting for the president, Miguel Díaz-Canel, and perhaps even the 95-year-old former president Raúl Castro, who hadn’t missed a 26 July celebration for 30 years. Read more

“We Bring With Us European Civilization”: Race, National Oppression and the Construction of a Settler-Colonial Myth. By Bill Fletcher Jr / Z

Central to Confronting Zionism is a challenge to how Zionism and the Palestinian/Israeli conflict are both understood. The book is, in effect, about Zionism, racism, imperialism, and the struggle to liberate the Palestinian people from what can only be thought of as total oppression.

In that sense the struggle cannot be limited to one for civil rights or truly constitutional government because it must begin with a recognition that Israeli oppression combines apartheid and permanent occupation. Read more

They lost their work permits and their legal status. Returning to Haiti is still ‘unimaginable.’ By Maria Ramirez Uribe / PBS

Approximately 350,000 Haitians and Syrians who have remade their lives in the United States are now at a crossroads. Their work permits and legal status have expired, yet their home countries haven’t recovered from the crises that drove them to seek Temporary Protected Status protections.

“It’s not that we don’t want to go back to Haiti,” Harriett Cecilia Joseph, one of the hundreds of thousands of people grappling with what to do next, told PBS News. “It’s just the situation doesn’t allow us to.” Read more

Ethics / Morality / Religion

How a Black Catholic church celebrates New Orleans, even in face of parish closures. By Jason Berry / NCR

On Aug. 25, 1901, Louis Armstrong was three weeks old when his paternal great-grandmother had him baptized at Sacred Heart of Jesus, a Canal Street parish in working-class Mid-City. During the Jim Crow era, the Catholic Church played a fallback role for African American mothers who gave birth at home and registered the infants at baptisms, rather than deal with state offices.

African Americans make up roughly 13% of Catholics here, compared to about 4% nationally. Yet now, as the annual Satchmo Summerfest just celebrated Armstrong’s birth with a jazz liturgy Aug. 2 in the historic St. Augustine Church, other majority-Black parishes have closed and merged in recent years, with the archdiocese citing general financial challenges and demographic shifts, and set against the backdrop of a five-year $360 million bankruptcy case over clergy child sexual abuse. Read more

Putting a price on Indigenous lives: A review of The Business of Killing Indians. By Jeffrey L. Johnson / The Christian Century

William Kiser’s sweeping history tracks three centuries of bounty hunters paid to kill and mutilate Native Americans.

Beginning in the 17th century, as European nations competed for territory in North America and immigrants struggled to settle the land, Indigenous inhabitants were killed and disfigured for pay. Drawing examples from three centuries, from 17th-century New France and New England to 18th-century Texas-Mexico borderlands to 19th-century Pacific Coast territories, historian William Kiser narrates the history of racial hatred and promises of financial reward that motivated the butchery of human beings by volunteer bounty hunters. Read more

Christopher Nolan’s Trojan Horse. By Ezra Klein / NYT

I’ll admit I’m a little late weighing in on “The Odyssey.” Chalk it up to having young kids. I don’t make it to the movies much. But what a trick its director, Christopher Nolan, has pulled off. Elon Musk did not understand what this movie was. But this movie understands what Musk is. It understands who we are becoming and who we have become, and it points a way out.

Tricks are central to “The Odyssey.” In myth, Odysseus is a trickster. He is described, in the first line of the story, as the man of many ways or of many wiles or of many turns. He is, depending on the translator, an ingenious man, a cunning man, a complicated man. He is a man of appetites and contradictions, a man who wants nothing more than to go home but keeps choosing to stay abroad, a man who yearns for his wife but cannot stop bedding goddesses. Odysseus is never one thing; he is always many things. Read more

Historical / Cultural

It Wasn’t a Civil War. It Was the Slaveholders’ Rebellion. By Anthony Conwright / NYT

Rebranding rebellion is nothing new. Americans take it for granted that the war between the Confederate states and the Union was always called the Civil War, but it was not. During the war and in its aftermath, it was primarily called an “insurrection” or a “rebellion.” Its current name is a result of decades of lobbying by Confederate heritage groups and white Southerners committed to rejuvenating the South’s image and ignoring its treason and slaveholding.

As Mr. Trump and his allies try to whitewash the Jan. 6, 2021, insurrection, we should return to an older and far more accurate name for the Civil War. We should once again call it the Slaveholders’ Rebellion. If a country unquestioningly adopts language that obscures its bloodiest crimes to absolve their worst perpetrators, how can we expect successive generations to remember the new assaults on democracy without deploying equally forgiving language? Read more

Trump Orders Warnings Placed at ‘Inaccurate’ Smithsonian History Museum. By Robin Pogrebin and Zachary Small / NYT

President Trump on Friday ordered warning signs and exhibits installed outside the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History to alert the public that the museum does not, in his view, accurately reflect American history.

The unusual directive, made through an executive order, was a considerable escalation of the president’s dispute with the Smithsonian and its history museum, which was the subject of a recent 162-page report. The report accused the museum’s director, Anthea M. Hartig, of “radical activist ideology” and the museum of undermining “faith in American institutions.” Read more

Four Histories of Race in America. By Namara Smith / The New Yorker

On November 10, 1898, armed white supremacists took over the city of Wilmington, North Carolina, killing an unknown number of Black townspeople and ousting the multiracial, democratically elected municipal government—an act that is thought to be the only successful coup on American soil. The massacre devastated Wilmington’s flourishing Black middle class and sent a message of impunity to white vigilantes nationwide.

Lauren Collins, a staff writer who grew up in Wilmington, writes about that day and its aftermath in her new book, “They Stole a City” (excerpted in The New Yorker), a multigenerational history that follows four families with members who were present at the massacre. I recently asked Collins which books she would recommend, from among those that she drew on to write hers. Her answers are below. Read more

How an 1876 massacre of Black men in South Carolina turned racial terror into political power. By Jacob Ware / The Conversation

This statue on the grounds of the South Carolina State House honors violent segregationist Ben Tillman, who also served as governor and U.S. senator.

As the U.S. celebrates its 250th anniversary, its citizens commemorate a democracy more diverse, free and inclusive than it’s ever been. The path to this milestone was imperfect and paved in blood and suffering. Still, few of the revelers will likely pay heed to the anniversary of another historic event: the 150th anniversary of the July 1876 Hamburg massacre.

The massacre, which took place in Hamburg, South Carolina, began as a dispute between a local Black militia and two white citizens over whether the latter could cross the group’s centennial Fourth of July parade. The militia leader, Doc Adams, was later charged with blocking a public highway. Read more

“If Emmett Till Lived”: Cultural Historian Sarah Lewis on New Book/Exhibit, Visit to Mississippi. By Amy Goodman / Democracy Now

What if Emmitt Till had lived? What if he had safely boarded the train back home to Chicago? More than 70 years after the kidnapping, torture and lynching of 14-year-old Emmett Till in Mississippi, a major new photography exhibit and companion book asks those questions by imagining not only the life young Emmett lost, but the decades he was denied. This is the exhibit’s curator, Sarah Elizabeth Lewis.

This exhibition, this publication and the invitation together offer a collective arena to consider how freedom has been secured on American ground. It is a creative monument to Emmett Till’s unlived life. It lets us picture what could have come, what should have come. It lets us imagine it, what it wrought, and what it signals about the work that remains. Read more

White parents who tell their kids that race doesn’t matter are ignoring the long shadow of racism. By James M. Thomas / The Conversation

“Look around.” “Pay attention.” “Be mindful of where you are and who you are with.” “Check in. With us. With yourself.” For parents of Black children, these four statements represent routine guidance they give, part of “the talk,” a well-worn ritual of racial socialization that shapes how Black children and adults learn what it means to live and get by in a white-dominated society. The family of Nolan Wells, during a July 20, 2026, service in Ocean Springs, Miss.,

Yet, for all the discussion now about the importance of “the talk” in Black families, the research I and others have done shows that there is no analagous discussion in white families about race. In fact, research finds that white parents have few, if any, direct conversations about race and racism with their children. When white parents do talk with their children about race and racism, research finds those parents often minimize and ignore the role of racism in daily life, or discuss it in vague and superficial terms. Read more

Sports

The WNBA’s Racism Problem: How the Clark-Reese Rivalry Exposed America. By Emerald Pages

The meteoric rise of the WNBA has been accompanied by a dark tide of racial abuse. The league built by Black women is now being monetized through a white superstar, exposing a deep-seated systemic racism that America refuses to confront.

For nearly three decades, the WNBA has been a sanctuary of Black excellence and progressive activism. It is a league where the majority of its players are Black women who have used their platforms to champion social justice, long before it was fashionable. Yet, as the league experiences unprecedented commercial success—a boom primarily fueled by the rivalry between Caitlin Clark and Angel Reese—it has also been forced to confront a harsh reality. The influx of money and attention has not come in a vacuum; it has served as a conductor for America’s pre-existing racial divisions, transforming a basketball rivalry into a battleground for a systemic racism that the league’s institutional framework is struggling to contain. Read more

‘It just means more’: Black college gymnasts competing in a divided South. By Caroline Price / The Guardian

Nyla Aquino’s rise at the University of Georgia reveals the tensions facing Black athletes as the SEC thrives while DEI programs and voting rights come under attack

Just three years before Stegeman Coliseum opened its doors, Aquino, a Black student athlete from Boston, would have had to fight to attend UGA. In 1961, the university admitted its first two Black students only after judicial order, and a mob of roughly 1,000 locals and Klan members rioted. Sixty-five years later, Aquino leads Georgia’s charge against Florida during Black History Month. While Black athletes perform, tumble and win for the Southeastern Conference, state lawmakers fight to redraw district lines and strip diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) programs from the very universities they represent. Read more

Noah Lyles Leads Historic Track and Field Season Fighting Against Haters. By Maleeha Shakeel / Essentially Sports

Ever since Usain Bolt retired in 2017, every sprinter has been compared to the Jamaican legend. His 9.58-second world record, set in 2009, still stands despite attempts from stars like Noah Lyles, Christian Coleman, and Fred Kerley.

So when Lyles posted a world-leading time and helped make 2026 the deepest men’s 100-meter season ever, many expected praise. Instead, some fans brushed away the feat, insisting that this generation will never achieve anything like Bolt. Read more

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