Featured
The Growing Gender Divide in the African American Community. By Ronald J. Sheehy, Editor / On Race in America
The remarkable educational and professional progress of African American women has been accompanied by a troubling reality: African American men have not advanced at the same rate. This growing divide has consequences not only for men and women, but for families, communities, and ultimately the larger society.
Read complete essay. The Growing Gender Divide in the African American Community. By Ronald J. Sheehy, Editor / On Race in America
The Week’s Top Stories
Political / Social
The Only Truth About Trump’s America Is That Everything Is a Lie. By David Rothkopf / Daily Beast
Our government is braindead. If they get their way, we’re next.
The president lies. His soon-to-depart press secretary lies… and so will her replacement, no matter who that is. His director of communications lies. His Cabinet secretaries lie. When economic data is released, it is no longer reliable. When casualty counts for military actions are announced, they are wrong. When new policy initiatives are announced, what we’re sure of is that the ones that might help us will never happen and the ones that appear crazy or ill-conceived will surely turn out worse than we can imagine. Read more
Related: It Was Inevitable That Trump Would Come to This. By Jamelle Bouie / NYT
The Long Con of John Roberts. By Bill Blum / The Progressive Magazine
As a young attorney in the Reagan Administration, he aimed to destroy the Voting Rights Act and undermine democracy. Now the Chief Justice has finished the job.
The con began in September 2005, during Roberts’s confirmation hearing before the Senate Judiciary Committee. Articulate, handsome, and energetic at fifty years old, Roberts seemed to have been culled “straight from central casting,” as Republican Senator Jeff Sessions of Alabama actually remarked on the first day of the hearings. Roberts was also convincing—he famously promised that if confirmed, he would serve in the fashion of a baseball umpire, calling only “balls and strikes, and not to pitch or bat.” Seventy-eight Senators, including twenty-two Democrats, fell for the ploy and voted to give him the lifetime assignment. Read more
Related: The False Fear of Noncitizen Voting. By Kica Matos / Time
The Alarming Rise of Black People Found Hanging but Ruled as Suicides. By Emerald Books
As public hangings of Black people rise, local authorities are dismissing them as suicides within 72 hours—contradicting CDC data, historical trauma, and the pleas of grieving families demanding the truth.
Across the United States, a deeply unsettling pattern has emerged over the past decade, intensifying in recent years. A rising number of Black individuals are being found hanging from trees in public spaces, and in the vast majority of these cases, local authorities are swiftly ruling their deaths as suicides. However, this official narrative is increasingly at odds with statistical reality, historical context, and the desperate pleas of the victims’ families, fueling a crisis of trust and demands for federal intervention. Read more
Related: Black father of nine found hanging in North Carolina as police say ‘everything is on the table.’ By Bolarinwa Oladeji / Yahoo
Related: Another Black Man Found Hanging In North Carolina. By Joe Jurado / Newsone
Young Black voters buck Democratic old guard. By Russell Contreras and Delano Massey / Axios
The nation’s old guard of Black leaders is still a key force for Democrats, but this year’s primaries have revealed the rising influence of Black Gen Z voters who aren’t swayed by their elders’ seniority, civil rights credentials or endorsements.
Driving the news: Michigan’s Democratic primary for Senate offered a snapshot of the growing generational divide among Black voters in particular. Read more
They’ve Been Screwed Over for 160 Years. Trump Is Screwing Them More. By Kali Holloway / TNR
The United States government has been cheating Black farmers since the false promise of 40 acres and a mule. But leave it to the Trump administration to make things even worse. Farmer Phillip “P.J.” Haynie III, his youngest son, Trevor, and father Philip Haynie II, in one of the family’s Virginia soybean fields.
Haynie—broad-shouldered, quick to smile, with the restless energy of someone perpetually calculating what comes next—is a fifth-generation Black row crop farmer who farms land split between Virginia and Arkansas. The United States Department of Agriculture, or USDA, has an admitted history of denying and intentionally delaying loans to Black farmers—driving tens of thousands of them into foreclosure and transferring nearly 16 million acres of their land into white hands. Read more
Is Hiring From ‘Central Casting,’ DEI for White People? By William Spivey / Levelman
In the Trump administration, central casting includes a preference for white people and, in certain roles, men. Pete Hegseth was handed a list of candidates for military promotions. He personally blocked all the Black and female officers.
Central casting is a place where the only requirement is to look the part. This must be how those opposed to DEI must think Black men and women got their jobs. Look the part, get the job, qualifications be damned. Read more
Backlash Against Anti-Racism Is a Constant Force Shaping US Politics. Josh Friedberg / Truthout
Philosopher George Yancy analyzes the contemporary expression of what W.E.B. Du Bois called the “entrails of whiteness.”
In the United States, the presidential administration is actively working to erase past gains in civil rights and environmental justice. This tendency is manifesting in many ways, including curtailing voting rights, whitewashing U.S. history teaching materials, and rolling back social services that disproportionately affect people of color. In this context, one of the most important books I’ve read from the last decade is George Yancy’s Backlash: What Happens When We Talk Honestly About Racism in America. I strongly believe that every white person needs to read and reckon with the ideas in Yancy’s book. Read more
Education
The Fight for Fair Funding at Tennessee State University. By Olivia Sanchez / Inside Higher Ed.
A new book from the former president of Tennessee State University reveals her battle to regain $544 million in documented underfunding.
Tennessee State University is one of the most underfunded historically Black land-grant universities in the country. In a 2023 letter to Tennessee Governor Bill Lee, former Education Secretary Miguel Cardona and former Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack said the state owed the institution more than $2 billion, accrued over the past three decades. Read more
Related: 12 HBCUs land $1 million each in new permanent endowment funding. By Ogafe Oghen / The Grio
As Trump pulls back school civil rights enforcement, who will protect Black students? By Gerren Keith Gaynor / The Grio
Education policy experts say states and school districts must step up as federal officials retreat from using racial disparities to investigate discrimination.
After the Trump administration moved to eliminate guidance on considering race in school discipline, education experts are sounding the alarm about how the Education Department’s new rule will impact Black students at a time when they are facing existing setbacks in the classroom. As theGrio previously reported, the Trump administration recently reversed a 2014 guidance issued by the Obama administration that encouraged schools to examine student discipline data for racial disparities, as Black students were suspended at disproportionately high rates. Read more
Why colleges are cutting Black studies departments, majors and classes. By Todd Wallack / Wash Post
More than a dozen schools have scaled back such programs, citing low enrollment, budget issues and state laws, a Washington Post review found.
U.S. colleges are increasingly slashing their African American studies and related programs, citing low enrollment and limited funding, at a time when the federal government is exerting intense pressure to end racial diversity efforts. Read more
Homeschooling Hate. By Mark Hay / The Progressive Magazine
The rise of open bigotry, remote learning, and underfunded public schools has white supremacists pulling children out of class and teaching them at home.
As the United States slowly enforced school integration starting in the late 1950s, white nationalists took an interest in de facto all-white private schools. But moving into the 1980s, explains Indiana University Bloomington professor of education policy Christopher Lubienski, diehard racists started to form insular communities—the seeds of the modern militia movement—to wall themselves off from mainstream society. Like conservative Christians, they turned to homeschooling as a fundamental tool for protecting themselves from what they considered corrosive forces. Read more
World
Trump just made the world a far more dangerous place: analysis. By Matthew Rozsa / AlterNet
President Donald Trump’s ongoing bromance with North Korea’s dictator, Kim Jong Un, is literally putting the world at risk of nuclear war, at least according to one political analyst.
Writing earlier this month for The Wall Street Journal, Trump’s former national security adviser John Bolton said that “Trump put North Korea and its rogue nuclear-weapons program back in the spotlight on Sunday. The president ordered the Defense Department ‘to substantially reduce’ this week’s annual U.S.-South Korean military field exercises to defend against a potential attack by the North. He made the same unilateral concession in his first term, a mistake that is even worse now.” Read more
Bessent Unveils Iran Sanctions Regime He Admits Could “Blow Up” Global Economy. By Sharon Zhang / Truthout
The treasury secretary pledged to “sever every economic lifeline” to Iran and its 92 million residents.
The “economic d-day” plan, dubbed “Operation Economic Outcast,” was unveiled by Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent in a press conference on Monday. The plan involves a wide-ranging sanctions regime, including an expanded mechanism for secondary sanctions that could be unrolled in coming weeks if Iran doesn’t soften its positions in negotiations or if allied countries like China don’t comply. Read more
Ethics / Morality / Religion
‘A Bible-sized blind spot’: congressman sounds alarm on rising Christian nationalism. By David Smith / The Guardian
In his new book, congressman Jared Huffman argues that theocratic insurgency has only grown more powerful after Donald Trump returned to the White House
“This Christian nationalist movement that I had seen growing so much stronger and more militant during my time in Congress erupted in plain view,” Huffman, 62, says by phone from his home in Marin county, California. “I truly believed January 6 would be the wake-up call our country needed to confront this movement to understand it and to hold it to account. “Unfortunately, the country went back to sleep and many of my own colleagues who the mob wanted to kill that day didn’t even seem to notice the religious elements of the group that was trying to kill them.” Read more
Harlem’s Muslim Map. By Maya King / NYT
The corner of 96th Street and Third Avenue in Manhattan is an intersection of two worlds.
Head west on 96th and you’ll pass multimillion-dollar apartments: The Upper East Side is one of the priciest neighborhoods in one of the nation’s most expensive cities. But walk north on Third Avenue and you’ll run right into Spanish Harlem, or El Barrio, where the median income is $42,000 — roughly half the citywide average — and there’s a mix of Latin American restaurants, public housing and concrete-lined playgrounds. The Islamic Cultural Center of New York sits between these two spheres. Taxi drivers and halal cart vendors pray there alongside United Nations delegates and corporate lawyers. The mosque is where I started a walking tour focused on the neighborhood’s Muslim history one recent morning. Read more
DOJ Whistleblower Confirms “Antisemitism” Probes Against Universities Were Sham Investigations. By Anjali Kamat / Democracy Now
Haley Van Erem, a former career attorney in the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division, has filed a complaint claiming the Trump administration task force charged with investigating antisemitism pushed universities into massive settlements despite turning up little to no evidence of anti-Jewish discrimination on campus.
Van Erem said in her complaint that the government’s probes into schools like Harvard, Brown and Columbia were “an unlawful process designed to achieve predetermined political goals.” Read more and listen here
Historical / Cultural
Trafficked on the last US slave ship, Cudjo Lewis never returned home to Benin. But his descendant has. By Adria R. Walker / The Guardian
Cassandra Lewis’s Benin citizenship reflects a broader push by African countries to reconnect with diaspora descendants
Cudjo Lewis, originally named Oluale Kossola, never forgot home – and he ensured that his descendants would remember a place that they might never see with their own eyes. Captured from the Bantè region of Benin, west Africa, Lewis was trafficked across the Atlantic Ocean and enslaved in rural Alabama in 1860, just one year before the onset of the US civil war and 52 years after the transatlantic slave trade was outlawed. Read more
Frederick Douglass’s Appeal for Impartial Suffrage. By Frederick Douglas / The Atlantic (January 1867 Issue)
“Statesmen, beware what you do. The destiny of unborn and unnumbered generations is in your hands.”
A very limited statement of the argument for impartial suffrage, and for including the negro in the body politic, would require more space than can be reasonably asked here. It is supported by reasons as broad as the nature of man, and as numerous as the wants of society. Man is the only government-making animal in the world. His right to a participation in the production and operation of government is in inference from his nature, as direct and self-evident as is his right to acquire property or education. Read more
Know Your Enemy: The Long Struggle Against Equality in America. By
Know Your Enemy
In this episode, we’re pleased to welcome back historian Kim Phillips-Fein, one of the truly outstanding observers of the right, past and present, working today, for a conversation about her new book, Country of Lords: Neo-Aristocrats, Social Darwinists, Tech Utopians, and the Long Fight Against Equality in America. It makes for a companion episode to our recent discussions on Lincoln and the Declaration of Independence, but this time about those who rejected equality: proponents of slavery, biological racists, captains of industry, and more, from the American founding through today’s tech billionaires like Peter Thiel. Listen here
How Paul Williams Built White and Black Los Angeles. Jori Finkel / NYT
A pioneering architect’s archive, long thought lost, was preserved by his family. Now, three museums are featuring the work of a man who broke California’s color barrier.
For years, rumor had it that the archive of the Los Angeles architect Paul Revere Williams, who died in 1980, was destroyed by fire during the 1992 riots in the city. Williams’s files were stored in the basement of the Broadway Federal Savings and Loan building — one of thousands of buildings he had designed during his pioneering 50-year career as the city’s most successful Black architect. When police officers were acquitted of using excessive force against Rodney King and the building went up in flames, people assumed documentation of his life’s work did as well. Read more
Exclusive: Navy weighs renaming carrier slated to honor Black war hero, potentially switching it to Trump. By Haley Britzky / CNN
The US Navy is working to rename an aircraft carrier under construction that was set to honor a Black sailor hailed for his heroic actions during the attack on Pearl Harbor, three sources familiar with internal discussions told CNN.
During President Donald Trump’s first term, the Navy announced that the Ford-class carrier would be called the USS Doris Miller, recognizing an enlisted sailor who helped defend US forces from Japan’s attack. It’s unclear what the Navy is seeking to change the name of the carrier to, though two of the sources said there have been internal conversations about renaming it to honor Trump. It would be an unprecedented move to name an aircraft carrier after a sitting president. Read more
Why Dolly Parton meant so much to Black communities: Black stars remember a one-of-a-kind icon. By Haniyah P. / The Grio
Through her career, personality and philanthropy, Dolly Parton built a legacy that transcended music, race and genre
This week, communities are grieving the death of country icon, community champion, and philanthropist Dolly Parton. Throughout her career, the 80-year-old style icon became a beloved figure in pop culture. However, the “Jolene” singer held a special place in the hearts of Black communities for a number of reasons. While many recognized her for bold, often bedazzled, sartorial choices and her country catalog, Parton was known for giving back, especially to underserved communities. Read more
Related: Dolly Parton Made an Undeniable Mark on Black Culture. By
Sports
At least one in four former NFL players in study suffered from degenerative brain disease CTE. By Reuters and Guardian Sport
At least one in four former NFL players who died between 2016 and 2021 was found to have had chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE), according to a study released on Tuesday.
Out of the 878 former players who died during that time frame, 235 donated their brains for study, researchers said, with 215 of those donated brains found to have CTE, a degenerative disease that can only definitively be diagnosed after death. CTE is associated with repeated blows to the head, including concussions. Symptoms include difficulty with attention and memory, dementia, mood disorders and headaches. Read more
Related: As CTE Cases Soar, Why Can’t Americans Quit the NFL? John Branch / NYT
‘Not a Black Queen In Sight’: Los Angeles Lakers Legends Make Internet Erupt Over Photos With Their Much Younger, White Wives. By Staff / The Shadow League
A recent photo of former Los Angeles Lakers greats Byron Scott, Robert Horry, Michael Cooper, and James Worthy standing behind their wives at a recent celebrity charity fundraiser hosted by the Harold & Carole Pump Foundation has social media in a frenzy.
The NBA greats, ranging in age from 70 to 56 years are accompanied by what appears to be much younger women. In the case of Hall of Famers Cooper, 70, and James Worthy, 65, their partners look more than half their ages. Read more
The North Was Lying: College Football’s Hidden Jim Crow System. By Jon Johnston / Corn Nation
Northern schools spent 80 years congratulating themselves for letting black players on the field — and quietly benching them whenever the South came to town.
On November 18, 1892, the University of Missouri forfeited a football game rather than play it. No team had ever done that before. Nebraska had a halfback named George Flippin, and Missouri decided losing was preferable to sharing a field with him. The story Americans know about football and segregation is a southern one. Bear Bryant. George Wallace. The SEC dragging its feet into the 1970s. All of it true. But the northern schools doing the moralizing ran their own color line for eighty years — not in statute, where somebody could have repealed it, but in phone calls between coaches. Read more
Coco Gauff and Arthur Fils Showcase Black Tennis Star Power at the Cincinnati Open. By Rashad Grove / The Root
From Coco Gauff’s dominant title run to a historic, all-Black Masters 1000 final between Arthur Fils and Frances Tiafoe, the 2026 Cincinnati Open proved that Black excellence is the future of tennis.
Coco Gauff and Arthur Fils had all of their Black athletic excellence on display as they capturing the Cincinnati Open titles on Sunday. Read more
Angel Reese Sends 5-Word Message After Setting Single-Game, Single-Season Rebounding Records. By Akshat Rajput / Essentially Sports
In Atlanta’s August 20 meeting with Los Angeles, Reese had made every shot she took, going 9-for-9 from the field, including two threes, while finishing with 20 points, 10 rebounds and eight assists. On Monday, the shot wasn’t there. Reese would later admit as much. But if she couldn’t take over with her scoring, she had another way to control the game.
Across the 38 minutes she played, Reese pulled down 26 rebounds in Atlanta’s 78-71 win over the Sparks, breaking the WNBA single-game record and, in the process, passing the league’s single-season mark as well. Read more
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