Featured
Civilizationism Is a Threat to Democracy. By Ronald J. Sheehy, Editor / On Race in America
Civilizationism is emerging as an influential idea on the American right, offering a different vision of who belongs in America and how power should be organized in the world. Its emphasis on ancestry, inherited culture, religion, and civilizational spheres raises fundamental questions about citizenship, national sovereignty, and democracy itself.
Read complete essay. Civilizationism Is a Threat to Democracy. By Ronald J. Sheehy, Editor / On Race in America
The Week’s Top Stories
Political / Social
The Age After Trump is coming. Better buckle up. By Doug SosniL / Wash Post
It won’t be easy to move away from the political era dominated by President Donald Trump.
The chaos of the 20 months since President Donald Trump returned to office is nothing compared with the volatility that will follow the midterms. In less than 40 days, the convergence of multiple forces will further destabilize the U.S. political system as the country moves beyond an era dominated by Trump. This period will trigger a full-throated debate about the future of the country as the ascendant wings of both political parties assume outsize influence amid the turmoil. Read more
Related: Trump can’t trick Americans into loving him. By Amanda Marcotte / Salon
Related: ‘He’s unfit’: Trump relative reveals signs his ‘Alzheimer’s’ has set in. By Nick Hilden / AlterNet
Can a Democratic Socialist Win in Deep-Red Florida? By Reveal / Mother Jones
Angie Nixon’s outspoken and progressive campaign for US Senate tries for an upset in the November midterms.
Back in August, Florida state Rep. Angie Nixon did something few outside the state saw coming: She won Florida’s Democratic US Senate primary. Her victory sent shock waves through the political world not only because her opponent Alex Vindman’s war chest dwarfed hers 19 to 1, but also because Nixon ran as a Democratic Socialist. Read more
Related: Pivotal Challenge for Talarico in Texas: Getting Black Voters to the Polls. J. David Goodman / NYT
Is Mississippi’s Senate race the sleeping giant of this election? Scott Colom thinks voters are waking up. By Gerren Keith Gaynor / The Grio
Colom argues Mississippi voters are growing frustrated with the status quo as he campaigns to become the state’s first Black U.S. senator since Reconstruction.
Mississippi is rarely at play for Democrats in statewide elections. But in the race for the U.S. Senate, Democratic nominee Scott Colom is closing in on Senator Cindy Hyde-Smith (as close as 6 points) in a state that President Donald Trump carried by 21 points in the 2024 presidential election. Read more
New poll finds Black women voters are approaching the midterms with Obama-era enthusiasm, but a different motivation. By Gerren Keith Gaynor / The Grio
Pollster Cornell Belcher says the energy resembles the Obama era, but today’s motivation is driven by urgency rather than optimism.
A new national poll of Black women is providing insights into their sentiments about the country’s direction under President Donald Trump, and reveals that while they are deeply dissatisfied, they remain determined to defend and protect their families and communities this election cycle. Read more
Related: Across the South, Black voters weigh a new political reality. By Bea Anhuci et al / Clarion Ledger
Related: Black Women Are Sounding the Alarm About Voting Rights and America’s Future. by
Trump’s immigration crackdown is testing Latino Republicans. By Leon Krauze / Wash Post
María Elvira Salazar’s Miami race exposes a growing tension inside the GOP.
Latino Republicans face a particularly difficult test. They have already had to answer for their support of Trump’s economic agenda at a time when many of their constituents are struggling with the cost of living. But another issue presents a challenge of a different order: immigration. Read more
Education
Outrage Grows as Temple Halts Admissions to Nation’s First Black Studies Ph.D. Program. By Walter Hudson / The Eduledger
Temple University’s decision to stop admitting new students to its doctoral program in Africology and African American Studies has angered the program’s founder, alumni and Philadelphia activists, who say the university is abandoning one of the most important programs in the history of Black studies.
Dr. Molefi Kete Asante, who founded the program and chaired the department until 2021, said faculty were never consulted about the decision. “Nobody. Not a word,” said Asante. “You would think that they would have the courtesy to at least say, ‘Look, this is what we’re going to do.’” Read more
Trump DOJ Drops Dozens Of School Desegregation Cases, But The Most Segregated Schools Are In The North. By Angela M. Bonner / Newsone
The Justice Department ended 57 desegregation orders, most of them in the Deep South, but research shows Black students are most isolated in states like New York and Illinois.
The Justice Department said Thursday it has ended more than 50 decades-old consent decrees aimed at undoing Jim Crow-era school segregation, CBS News reports. Harmeet Dhillon, who heads the department’s Civil Rights Division, called the orders onerous and outdated. She said federal oversight no longer reflects what classrooms look like today. The New York Times puts the total at 57 cases dropped since Trump returned to office. Nearly 80% were in Alabama, Mississippi, South Carolina, Georgia and Louisiana. The department says it is reviewing every remaining desegregation case filed in the 1960s and 1970s. Read more
Individual Choices Won’t Fix America’s Public Schools. By Jay Caspian King / The New Yorker
Nikole Hannah-Jones sent her daughter to a struggling local school and has come to regret it. But personalizing the problem is the wrong approach.
Hannah-Jones has written a stunning essay, her most emotionally wrenching work since her 2014 investigation into school segregation in Tuscaloosa, Alabama. Every parent who has had to make a choice between their ideals and what’s best for their child has felt some degree of Hannah-Jones’s misery upon realizing that she might have harmed her daughter’s future. I have significant disagreements with Hannah-Jones about what we can do to solve the intolerable and thoroughly immoral problem of school segregation, which I detail below. Read more
Related: Nikole Hannah-Jones just ran head-first into the great dumbing-down. By Paul Ollinger / The Hill
At HBCUs, More Black Men Are Choosing College and Finding New Support. By Jatika Hudson / The Eduledger
Some historically Black colleges and universities are enrolling more men, and their leaders are now focused on getting those students to graduation.
In Columbia, South Carolina, Benedict College now enrolls more male than female undergraduates, making it one of the few HBCUs to do so. Dr. Roslyn Clark Artis, Benedict’s president, said she believes the only other one is Morehouse College. Morehouse’s enrollment rose from 2,152 students in 2020-21 to 2,847 in 2024-25, an increase of about 32%, according to College Tuition Compare. Read more
Ethics / Morality / Religion
Religion Is the Roberts Court’s Unfinished Business. Linda Greenhouse / NYT
Chief Justice John Roberts has accomplished so much of his agenda that it’s not easy, as he begins his 22nd Supreme Court term, to think of what unfinished business might remain.
A series of decisions, most of which bear the chief justice’s name, has established the principle, without precedent in constitutional history, that whatever public benefit secular institutions get, religious institutions are entitled to as well. Read more
How ‘Cultural Christianity’ Weaponizes Faith for Politics. By Duncan Edward Pile / Patheos
‘Cultural Christianity’ is a warped expression of the Christian faith that is less about following Jesus and more about dressing national culture in religious robes to give that culture added legitimacy. Typically, this happens when that culture has become extreme and wants to add religious authority to its arsenal.
I live in the UK, and this movement is swiftly gathering momentum. They call on the name of Christ while acting in ways Jesus never would, targeting people of colour and people who follow faiths other than Christianity. I hear blatant calls for a white, homogeneous society and hatred of both Jews and Muslims, stirred up by the far-right’s so-called ‘patriotic’ message. Read more
Who Gets to Decide A.I.’s Moral Code? By Lauren Jackson / NYT
A small number of people are shaping what chatbots value. Those choices are already influencing how people think.
Norbert Wiener, an American mathematician and computer scientist, argued in 1960 that humans and machines are like aliens to each other. This idea became known later as the alignment problem. Essentially: How can humans get automated machines to behave as intended? All these decades later, much of the A.I. debate is focused on misalignment — how can we ensure the technology creates a utopia, not a dystopia? A small number of people at companies like Anthropic, Google and OpenAI are dedicated to the alignment question. They write constitutions and guardrails that shape how chatbots behave, and what decisions they make on their own. (At Anthropic, Claude’s constitution was internally called the “soul doc.”) Read more
World
Top Trump figures push to direct human rights funding to rightwing causes. By Andrew Roth and Joseph Gedeon / The Guardian
Support such as for white Afrikaners and anti-communism reveals how US is redefining what qualifies as human rights
With hours left before the funding expires, the Trump administration is pushing to direct more than $175m of the state department’s flagship human rights fund to a slate of awards that includes a huge $40m grant for an anti-communism fund, support for a group advancing white Afrikaner rights in South Africa, a campaign against Brazil’s supreme court and programs that would reward ideological allies in Europe who protect “western civilizational norms”. Read more
ICE Is Still Targeting the Haitian Community in Springfield. By Shireeb Akram-Boshar / Truthout
Hundreds of Haitians in the Ohio town are being forced to wear ankle monitors while they await immigration hearings.
For the past two months, hundreds of Haitians in Springfield have been targeted by immigration authorities and forced to wear ankle monitors, as the Trump administration metes out collective punishment to appeal to its far right base. Read more
“Buying More Time for the Genocide”: Muhammad Shehada on Trump’s Gaza Plan 1 Year Later. By Amy Goodman / Democracy Now
“The [ceasefire] plan ended up just buying more time for the genocide,” says Muhammad Shehada, a writer and analyst from Gaza speaking to Democracy Now! in Copenhagen. “Instead of suspending attacks on Gaza, Israel has been bombing Gaza every day.”
“The idea of the plan was to divide the reconstruction, rehabilitation, Israeli withdrawal, decommissioning of Hamas and Palestinian statehood into three phases,” says Shehada. “So far, only one item of the 20 items on the Trump plan has been fulfilled, and that is the release of every single Israeli hostage in Gaza.” Read more
Cuba tensions on the rise as Trump pushes for ‘fundamental change.’ By Rebecca Beitsch / The Hill
Tensions between the U.S. and Cuba are rising once again after President Trump told world leaders gathered at the United Nations General Assembly that he was seeking “fundamental change” from the island and asserting that “freedom will be coming to Cuba.”
The Trump administration has never walked back threats of a possible military intervention — an idea Cuban leaders were asked about this week after a report from CBS News. Read more
Historical / Cultural
The Untold Story of The Elaine Massacre of 1919. By Angela Wilson / The Root
This week marks the 107th anniversary of the Elaine Massacre of 1919, where white mobs hunted and killed Black sharecroppers who simply wanted fair cotton prices.
Two years before the Tulsa Race Massacre in 1921, one of the bloodiest racial slaughters in American history occurred in Phillips County, Arkansas. This week marks the 107th anniversary of the tragedy, when hundreds of Black sharecroppers gathered to organize for fair cotton prices. For that simple demand, they were met with a state-sanctioned manhunt that history class conveniently forgot to mention. Read more
What Assata Shakur Still Teaches Us About Black Freedom, Love And Survival. By Josh Pickens / Newsone
Assata’s words have traveled so far that it’s possible to know them without knowing much about the woman who wrote them.
I can’t remember the first time I heard Assata Shakur’s words. “It is our duty to fight for our freedom. It is our duty to win.” They’ve been with me for so long that I can’t locate their beginning. Somewhere in the years I spent becoming a writer and organizer, a Black woman trying to understand what it meant to love Black people enough to fight for us, Assata’s words became part of the language I carried. Read more
The singular and tragic history of Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas. By Juan Williams / The Hill
Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas is a singular figure in U.S. history. If he remains on the bench for the next two years, he will be the longest-serving justice in American history. But his singular place in history is now tragic.
First, he is at the heart of a historic decline in public trust in the Supreme Court. Second, as the most powerful Black Republican in national politics, he has damaged trust in Black conservatives as a source of innovative thinking for dealing with racial problems. Read more
The Quaker Reparations That Helped This Black Philly Family Build Generational Wealth. By Phenix S. Halley / The Root
A $10,000 grant from a Quaker congregation helped one Black Philadelphia family build homeownership, stability and generational wealth.
For one Black family in Philadelphia, reparations didn’t come as a check or another government promise. They came as house keys, offering a tangible glimpse of what reparations can look like beyond the national debate. Read more
Rare footage brings the legends of the Harlem Renaissance back to life 50 years later. By Kay Wicker / The Grio
“Once Upon a Time in Harlem” captures Black cultural icons gathering at Duke Ellington’s home in 1972. A still from “Once Upon A Time In Harlem.”
On a warm August afternoon in Harlem, New York, in 1972, a cocktail party took place at Duke Ellington’s home. Not just any cocktail party but one filled with Black painters, poets, writers, musicians, and other luminaries who, more than five decades earlier, gave birth to the Harlem Renaissance. And we almost never saw the footage. Read more
Mighty Sparrow, legendary calypso singer who brought Caribbean music worldwide, dies at 91. By Odafe Oghen / The Grio
The Grammy-winning singer and songwriter became one of calypso’s most influential figures through his music, satire and storytelling.
His career helped carry calypso, one of the Caribbean music genres with deep regional roots, far beyond Trinidad and Tobago. Francisco’s rise also unfolded during the era when Harry Belafonte helped bring Caribbean sounds into mainstream U.S. pop culture with his 1956 album “Calypso.” Read more
Sports
NY Knicks Still Discussing If They Will Visit Trump At White House: Coach. By Brian Mahoney / HuffPost
Coach Mike Brown says the NBA champions are deciding if they will become the first NBA champions to visit the White House under President Donald Trump.
The president has traditionally invited the reigning champions, but that has not been the case under Trump. No team went during his first term or after he was elected again in 2024. But Trump and Knicks owner James Dolan are close. They sat together when Trump attended Game 3 of the NBA Finals at Madison Square Garden, and Dolan indicated after the Knicks won the championship that an offer would be accepted. Read more
Colin Kaepernick knows what kneeling cost — and he’d do it again. By Rann Miller / Salon
“I am not going to stand up to show pride in a flag for a country that oppresses Black people and people of color . . . There are bodies in the street and people getting paid leave and getting away with murder,” Kaepernick told NFL Media in an exclusive interview following his now-infamous kneel.
Following a lengthy and seemingly self-imposed silence, as others sought to narrate his protest and commitment to social justice, Kaepernick has reemerged in the public square on an impressive press run promoting his book, “The Perilous Fight,” to whoever will listen, including the platforms of Karen Hunter, Katie Couric, Van Lathan, Trevor Noah, and “The View.” Read more
In 2026, Azeez Al-Shaair’s ‘Controversial’ Eye Blacks Are The Closest Thing To Athlete Activism. By Carron J. Phillips / Newsone
Amid Kaepernick’s press tour, the Houston Texans linebacker embodies the NFL’s stagnation and the regression of athletes’ activism.
Before last Sunday’s game in Indianapolis against the Colts, Al-Shaair took to social media to post a photo of an eye black that featured the names of two Palestinian children who were killed in Gaza. During Week 1, he wrote “Hind Rajab,” the name of another Palestinian girl who had been killed in Gaza, on his eye black and was fined $11,941. “What’s a life worth?” he said when asked about the penalty. “Is a life worth $11,000? I think it’s priceless. So, to sit there and say that, ‘Oh man, the money’ and whatever, that wasn’t relevant to me.” Read more
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