Featured
The Bible as a Road Map for Liberation. By Ronald J. Sheehy, Editor / On Race in America
For generations, African American preachers have interpreted the Bible through the experience of their people, finding in Scripture a message of human dignity, justice, and freedom. Dr. Howard-John Wesley’s sermon on Sunday, September 20, 2026, continued that tradition. From slavery through the civil rights movement to the present day, the African American pulpit has transformed biblical teachings into a powerful source of individual and collective liberation. Pastor Howard-John Wesley preaching at Alfred Street Baptist Church. AI-generated illustration.
Read complete essay. The Bible as a Road Map for Liberation. By Ronald J. Sheehy, Editor / On Race in America
The Week’s Top Stories
Political / Social
Trump Makes Republicans More Racist and Democrats Less So. By Thomas B. Edsall / NYT
President Trump’s corruption is unequaled by any previous resident of the White House. If anything, his narcissism ranks higher than his corruption. Just look at the Kennedy Center or the East Wing of the White House or Trump’s proposed triumphal arch.
Today, though, I want to look at another destructive aspect of Trump’s ascendancy: what he has done to the nation’s ability to deal with an issue that has plagued the United States since its founding and even before — race. Trump has not only halted the agonizingly slow accommodation of conservative whites to a multiracial nation, he has also legitimated and exacerbated the most toxic attitudes toward race and immigration held by Republican voters. Read more
Related: Trump Has Finally Lost the Plot. Jonathan Rauch and Peter Wehner / NYT
Related: Trump’s Press Ban Feels Familiar to Black Journalists. By Phil Lewis / The Root
Byron Donalds unexpectedly joins a growing crowd, scrubs his website of Trump references. By Steve Benen / MS Now
The congressman’s move away from Trump suggests that the winds are shifting in Florida, and they’re not at Republicans’ backs.
It’s not exactly a secret that Donald Trump is an unpopular president who’s become an anchor around the necks of his political allies. The question, with six weeks remaining in the midterm elections cycle, is what Republicans are prepared to do about it. Read more
Related: Will race matter more than party in Florida’s governor election? By John A. Torres / Florida Today
Related: 2026 midterms: Why Trump’s Latino voters are fleeing him. By Katie Fossett and Astead Herndon / Vox
Angie Nixon Is Running to Make History While Facing Trial for Voting Rights Protest. By Brandon Tensley / Capital B
As Black Floridians confront shrinking representation and political disillusionment, Nixon says the moment demands persistence.
Angie Nixon has spent more than two decades advocating for Black and working-class communities in Florida. But the Jacksonville native didn’t make a splash on the national stage until she stunned many in her bid to become the state’s first Black senator. Read more
Joyce Beatty leads legal fight over Trump’s Kennedy Center plans. By Odafe Oghen / The Grio
The former CBC chair has twice prevailed in court as she challenges efforts to rename and make major changes to the performing arts center.
Rep. Joyce Beatty is the sole plaintiff in the federal lawsuit challenging President Donald Trump’s plans for the Kennedy Center, taking the dispute from board meetings into court. The Wall Street Journal reported that Beatty, an Ohio Democrat and former chair of the Congressional Black Caucus, has now prevailed twice in federal court in her challenge to actions taken by Trump and the Kennedy Center board. Read more
Related: How the Congressional Black Caucus Is Organizing to Protect Black Voting Power. by
The GOP’s White Nationalism Problem Goes All the Way to the Top. By Cathy Young / The Bulwark
The blood-and-soil extremists have donors, institutions, administration ties—and plenty of friends in MAGA.
THE ISSUE OF WHITE NATIONALISM on the right and its infiltration of the Republican party burst out into the open in mainstream conservative discourse this week. First, on Sunday, Bo French, the GOP nominee for Texas Railroad Commissioner, expressed his dismay at a photo of mostly South Asian and black young people having fun at a University of Texas football game. His post went viral on X. Read more
Unanswered Questions Surrounding New Nolan Wells Grand Jury Decision. By Phenix S. Halley / The Root
For Nolan Wells’ family, a grand jury’s latest decision may offer a legal conclusion, but it does not resolve lingering questions on how he died.
A Jackson County grand jury may have cleared the legal board in the death of 18-year-old Nolan Wells, but its “no true bill” decision has done little to resolve the unsettling silence surrounding how he actually died on Horn Island. While prosecutors insist the physical evidence points to drowning, key gaps–including an unexplained head injury, degraded toxicology and missing personal belongings–leave a grieving family and a distrustful public demanding answers the legal system didn’t deliver. Read more
Related: Black Man Found Hanging From Tree In Maryland Community. By Joe Jurado / Newsone
Education
In Fighting for Every Black Child, Did I Betray My Own? Nikole Hannah-Jones / NYT
A decade ago, I made a decision about my daughter’s education that I hoped would challenge New York City’s separate and unequal school system. Now 16, she thinks I made the wrong choice.
I could feel her looking at me. Her body slung in adolescent impertinence against the front passenger seat door, shoulders turned so she could face me fully. Usually when I picked up my daughter, Najya, from middle school, she’d tumble into the car and bombard me with the day’s escapades, chattering nonstop about her friend group or complaints about an annoying teacher or her wonder at the test she’d aced despite thinking she’d failed it. But not this day. Read more
Getting In Was Not the Hard Part. By Chloe K. Williams / Inside Higher Ed.
Why SAT scores still miss the point.
Day two of the University of California Board of Regents meeting. I was standing outside the UCSF Mission Bay Conference Center, waiting for the Student and Academic Affairs Committee meeting to start, when a simple question to another attendee led to a conversation about who deserves to be a UC student. I mentioned the intensity of the earlier meeting and that I supported keeping SAT scores out of UC admissions. She asked why. I explained that a single test is an unfair barrier for underrepresented students and that UC’s own research shows it poorly captures students’ potential. Read more
What Trump Just Doesn’t Get About Our Long, Sordid History of Racism In Higher Education. By Ian Kumamoto / HuffPost
As someone who is college-educated, Latino and Asian, I am hyper-aware of how absurd his rationale is.
Last week, the Trump administration announced a regulation that could strip tax-exempt status from schools and universities that provide financial support specifically to Black and other minority students. The administration argues that scholarships intended to address the disenfranchisement of Black, Latino and other marginalized communities from accessing higher education are discriminatory against white and Asian students. Read more
Related: UT Austin Eliminates Four Ethnic and Gender Studies Majors. By Jatika Hudson / Eduledger
World
Trump Threatens to “Annihilate” Iran and Its People in UN Address. By Alex Nguyen / Mother Jones
The president said he was still deciding “whether to drive them into hell with no chance of survival.”
“Do I annihilate the Islamic Republic and do it quickly, never giving them a chance to kill and destroy people and countries again? Do I drive them into hell with no chance of survival and no hope of future greatness or generations?” Trump pondered aloud, claiming that Iran’s leadership had rejected multiple peace deals with the US. He said little about the terms of those offers—and nothing about the US and Israel’s explosive role in the Middle East, from Iran and the Gulf to Gaza and beyond. Read more
What Life Is Actually Like in Gaza Today. By Isaac Chotiner / The New Yorker
Nearly a year after the ceasefire, the analyst Jaser AbuMousa explains the impediments to rebuilding, and the devastation of his own family.
At least twenty-one people, many of them children, were killed earlier this week after a building collapsed in Gaza City, highlighting the dangerous conditions that still exist in the Gaza Strip. The building, like much of the remaining infrastructure in Gaza, had been damaged by Israeli strikes in the war that began after the massacre of October 7, 2023, and which has now killed seventy-four thousand Palestinians. Read more
Why Republicans are facing pushback over Trump’s transactional Cuba policy. By Howard LaFranchi / CS Monitor
In the run-up to the midterms, the Trump administration’s business approach to Cuba is not sitting well with the Cuban American community.
In Venezuela, President Donald Trump has demonstrated that his principal objective in deposing President Nicolás Maduro was taking control of the South American country’s vast oil reserves. In Cuba, Mr. Trump appears to have set his sights on mineral deposits – nickel and cobalt in particular – with a personal interest in the Caribbean island’s commercial real estate potential that predates his political career. Read more
Jamaica hails King’s decision to refer slavery reparations petition to privy council as ‘really big deal.’ By Natricia Duncan / The Guardian
The move comes after Jamaica’s culture minister Olivia Grange travelled to the UK earlier this month to lodge the historic petition. Olivia Grange, Jamaica’s minister of culture, has hailed the King’s decision to refer her slavery reparations petition to the privy council.
King Charles has referred a landmark slavery reparations petition from Jamaica to a high-level UK appeals court for legal advice, Jamaica’s culture minister announced in parliament on Tuesday. Referring to the move as a “really big deal”, Olivia Grange told Jamaica’s MPs the monarch had confirmed that their legal questions have been passed on to the London-based privy council – the final court of appeal for UK overseas territories and some Commonwealth countries. Read more
Ethics / Morality / Religion
The ethical cases for immigration as a human right. By J. Toby Reiner / The Conversation
U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement arrested roughly 50,000 immigrants in July and August 2026; almost 80% of those migrants did not have a criminal record. Until the end of the Biden administration, federal authorities did not expect migrants to leave the country while their visa renewal was pending. The Trump administration has changed that policy.
ICE has defended itself for the overall scale of detentions by saying that it is simply enforcing federal immigration law. However, immigrant rights advocates are skeptical about this claim and wary about the lack of oversight of ICE agents. Read more
Understanding the Bible in terms of justice isn t new. By Zenn Hess / The Christian Century
Claudia Setzer traces a bold tradition of reading scripture for the love of God, neighbor, and a more humane society.
Setzer describes her book as “a set of observations on the biblical resources available to reformers and the clever and myriad ways they interpreted the text.” They drew from ancient and contemporary methods, engaging alternative interpretations directly and indirectly. They challenged readings that were often more conventional, popular, or politically correct. Cleverness is a theme that marks many of these figures’ interpretive work. Read more
Can Democrats Reclaim the Christian Moral High Ground? By Jia Lynn Yang / NYT
A surprising number of pastors are running as Democrats this year, challenging Americans’ assumptions about politics and faith.
When James Talarico, the Texas Democrat running for the Senate, appeared on Jimmy Kimmel’s late-night show this month, he put forward a question that many American millennials may recall from the cloth bracelets that were de rigueur among Christian youth groups in the 1990s. “I often wonder,” Talarico said, “What would Jesus do if he visited the U.S. Senate?” Read more
Related: The Rise of Cultural Christianity. by Duncan Edward Pile / Patheos
Historical / Cultural
Our understanding of the slave trade is still evolving. Letters / The Guardain
Readers respond to William Pettigrew’s article about the lasting significance of the slave trade to Britain’s politics, economy, institutions and culture
William Pettigrew’s book, Britain’s Slave Traders: A Forgotten History, adds a further dimension and depth to our understanding of how entrenched and significant Britain’s involvement in the transatlantic slave trade was. Read more
Thomas Jefferson’s DNA Finally Confirms What Black People Already Knew. By Phenix S. Halley / The Root
After generations of debate, new DNA research supports the story Sally Hemings’ descendants have long carried through their family.
For more than two centuries, the question surrounding Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings was treated as one of America’s great historical mysteries. Now, scientists say they have something generations of Hemings’ descendants never needed to prove to themselves: Jefferson’s DNA. Read more
Related: The Lost Descendants of Thomas Jefferson/ By Jullian Lucas / The New Yorker
Whites Only. By Ari Berman and Pema Leny / Mother Jones
When Democratic Rep. Cleo Fields appeared before the state Senate that day to testify against the new redistricting plans, he was joined by three other veteran Black politicians. Although Fields, a 63-year-old lawyer, has a reputation as an even-keeled consensus builder, he grew emotional as he spoke.
“To me, it is personal,” he told the Senate committee. “Since Reconstruction, Louisiana has elected four African Americans to Congress. And you’re looking at all of them. Four.” Even though nearly a third of Louisiana’s population is Black. Read more
From Abolitionist to Race Woman: Charlotte Forten’s Black Feminist Legacy. By Mickell Carter / AAIHS
In today’s post, Mickell Carter, an editorial assistant at Global Black Thought (the official journal of AAIHS), interviews Jaimie D. Crumley about her article, “‘And Then Forget’: Charlotte (“Lottie”) Forten and the Nineteenth-Century Black Feminist Project to be Remembered,” which examines how Antebellum Black abolitionist women were proto-race women. They were moral leaders of the biracial abolitionist cause.
Charlotte L. Forten (1837–1914) was a proto-race woman. She served as a personal, intellectual, and relational bridge between antebellum abolitionist women and the race women born during and after the Civil War era. This article situates Forten within the historiography of nineteenth-century race women whose private, semi-private, and public writings, activist pedagogy, and relationship-building demanded that Black women and their ideas be remembered. Read more
We’ve Only Seen Them in Photos—Now a New Doc Brings Harlem Renaissance Icons to Life. By Shanell Genal / The Root
An upcoming documentary gives viewers an intimate, unforgettable seat at a 1972 gathering of Harlem Renaissance legends. Photo of Duke Ellington.
We’re talking about the forthcoming film, “Once Upon a Time in Harlem,” directed by acclaimed filmmaker William Greaves. Inspired by the legacy of fellow filmmaker Jean Bach’s “A Great Day in Harlem,” with a nod to Sergio Leone’s “Once Upon a Time in…” title, Greaves’ upcoming film centers around a four-hour party in 1972 that he pulled together, with more than a handful of living luminaries of the Harlem Renaissance. Read more
‘A Different World’ finds its next generation. By Keith Murphy / Andscape
The iconic HBCU sitcom returns after 33 years with new students, familiar faces and the same commitment to Black stories.
The beloved sitcom returns as a buzzy, Netflix-stamped, 10-episode sequel for Generation Z. A lot is riding on the series, led by the show’s original executive producer Debbie Allen and first-time showrunner Felicia Pride. After all, A Different World is Black sitcom royalty. Read more
‘Good Times’ Cast: Where Are They Now? By Shannon Dawson / Newsone
From the Evans family to fan-favorite characters, discover the fascinating post-‘Good Times’ journeys of the talented actors who brought this groundbreaking show to life.
When Good Times premiered in 1974, it broke new ground as one of the first major network sitcoms to center on a Black family. Created by Eric Monte and Mike Evans and developed by television legend Norman Lear, the series followed the Evans family as they worked to make ends meet while raising their children in a Chicago public housing project. Read more
Sports
Converse Pulls Ad After Outrage Over Racist Imagery. By Joe Jurado / Newone
At first glance, Converse’s latest ad campaign looks like a pair of feet hanging next to a white robe, which drew understandable outrage.
The Washington Post reports that the ad campaign promoted the Chuck 70 X, a redesign of the brand’s signature Chuck Taylor shoe. The company removed the ad from most of its social media platforms over the weekend, though many people are understandably upset that the campaign was approved in the first place. If you weren’t aware, a few weeks ago Converse, which is owned by Nike, released a new ad campaign that showed a woman wearing a white skirt holding a pair of Chuck Taylors. While it sounds innocuous, the lighting and framing of the image looked a lot like a Ku Klux Klan robe, with the shoes resembling a pair of hanging feet. Read more
Related: Watching Bigots Erupt. By David French / NYT
Noah Lyles Reigns on Top of Track and Field as 100m Sprinters End Historic Season. By Sayantan Roy / Essentially Sports
Noah Lyles may have finished his 2026 season earlier than expected, but the year still ended with his name sitting at the top of a remarkable 100m story. The American’s 9.79-second run at the USATF Championships was impressive on its own. But the bigger headline came from the depth behind him.
And Lyles had already made sure he would be part of that conversation. At the US Championships in New York, the Olympic champion matched his personal best with a wind-legal 9.79, finishing ahead of Ronnie Baker and Kenny Bednarek, who both clocked 9.88. It was the same time Lyles ran to win Olympic gold in Paris two years earlier. Read more
“Strip Down to Your Drawers”: Ex-49ers QB Colin Kaepernick Takes Aim at NFL Draft Evaluations in Ryan Clark Interview. By Papiya Chattejee / Essentially Sports
Colin Kaepernick is currently on a tour to promote his memoir, The Perilous Fight. The former quarterback is back under the spotlight after an unceremonious exit from the game and a battle with the NFL. Years later, Kaepernick is shedding light over the harsher realities of the league’s draft evaluations.
“When you get to the point that it’s like, ‘strip down to your drawers,’ it’s like, well, ‘Why do I need to do this?’” Kaepernick said on The Pivot podcast. “But also, I mean, I guess this is what I have to do, and everybody’s doing it like, all right, this is part of the process. Read more
‘Shaq, Really?’: Shaq’s Shocking New Title from Trump’s FBI Director Patel Sparks Backlash as Fans Question Where His Loyalty Lies. By Nicole Duncan-Smith / Atlanta Black Star
Shaquille O’Neal has spent decades collecting championships, trophies, business deals and television credits. He has also amassed honorary distinctions, claiming titles that some people work years to obtain.
His latest designation, however, has shocked some fans who never expected to see him publicly aligned with one of President Donald Trump’s most controversial appointees. Read more
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