Featured
Migration Panic and Demographic Change. As We Celebrate the Ideals of July 4th. By Ronald J. Sheehy, Editor / On Race in America
As Americans celebrate Independence Day, we rightly honor the nation’s founding and the ideals of liberty and self-government. Yet every generation must also confront a recurring question: Who belongs within the American community, and on what basis? Today’s debates over immigration and demographic change are not simply disputes about borders. They are debates about the meaning of American nationhood itself. This essay examines that larger question.
Read complete essay. Migration Panic and Demographic Change: As We Celebrate the Ideals of July 4th. By Ronald J. Sheehy, Editor / On Race in America
Related: How Trumpism Betrays the Declaration of Independence. By Laura K. Field / The Bulwark
The Week’s Top Stories
Political / Social
The America That’s Still Possible. By Ezra Klein / NYT
On America’s 250th anniversary, Bryan Stevenson, a civil rights lawyer and the founder of the Equal Justice Initiative, looks toward the work that is ahead for the country.
I’m in Montgomery, Ala. I think of Montgomery in some ways as the birthplace of American democracy. Not where it was conceived — that’s the founding — but where the actual thing promised at the founding really began to be born. This is where the Montgomery bus boycott began. It led to the civil rights movement — which led to the triumphs and the laws that, for the first time, made America some version of the democracy and the country that it initially promised to be. Read more and listen here
Trump biographer exposes the ‘demented’ fantasy driving his endless greed. By Thomas Kika / AlterNet
He continued, giving voice to Trump’s mindset: “‘It’s a fair exchange. I’m Donald Trump, I’m the president of the United States. I should get something out of this.’”
According to financial disclosure documents obtained by the New York Times on Tuesday, Trump took in a “stunning windfall” of around $2.2 billion in 2025, up from just $622 million in 2024, prior to his return to the White House. The report further revealed that the revenue came from a United Arab Emirates-affiliated wealth fund that acquired a major stake in “the Trump family’s main crypto company, World Liberty Financial, a transaction that blurred the line between foreign policy and private enterprise.” Read more
Related: Impeachment is the only answer to Trump’s behavior. By Heather Digby Parton / Salon
Why The Birthright Citizenship Ruling Still Impacts Black Americans. By Phenix S. Halley / The Root
Following SCOTUS’ ruling on birthright citizenship, one legal expert warned that while the case began as an immigration issue, all Black Americans should be paying close attention.
At issue was Trump’s effort to deny citizenship to certain children born on U.S. soil to parents who are in the country illegally or temporarily. The administration argued such children are not entitled to citizenship under the 14th Amendment because they are not fully “subject to the jurisdiction” of the United States. But while the case was painted as an immigration issue, experts previously warned the high court’s ruling could specifically target Black Americans with ancestry dating back to chattel slavery and the Reconstruction era. Read more
Related: Justice Thomas Invokes Black History To Argue Against Birthright Citizenship In Dissent. By and
The Court That Will Believe Absolutely Anything Is ‘Race-Neutral.’ By Adam Serwer / The Atlantic
The majority gives Trump yet more license to discriminate.
Trump-administration officials have made no secret of their desire to purge the United States of nonwhite immigrants. Donald Trump has declared, “If you import The Third World, you become The Third World,” a common refrain repeated by his advisers. Trump has also said that immigrants have “bad genes,” that they are genetically predisposed to crime, and that they are “poisoning the blood of our country”—coming, as they are, “from Africa, from Asia, all over the world.” Read more
Four Black women. Nine degrees. Not one steady paycheck. By Robert Samuels and Lydia Sidhom / Wash Post
The president promised to save “Black jobs,” but his policies have resulted in fresh pain for the Black middle class as the employment gap widens.
College-educated black Americans — especially women — have struggled to find jobs after the Trump administration made reductions to the federal workforce and the imposition of tariffs slowed hiring. Some of those looking for work worry that companies might be scared to hire them during a period when the government is actively encouraging White men to file complaints about workplace discrimination. Read more
GOP Beware: The Rise of the Political ‘Black BackLash.’ By Phenix S. Halley / The Root
Experts suggest Republicans celebrated small gains with minority voters way too early. Now, that progress is threatened by American “backlash” politics.
The Republican Party celebrated breakthroughs with Black voters in 2024. But all of that progress is now being threatened as the Trump administration’s policies negatively impacting Black Americans have resulted in sharp disapproval. As we inch closer to November midterm elections, analysts say a “backlash” is upon us, and it might spell trouble for the GOP. Read more
DEI Isn’t Dead: New Research Finds Most Companies Still Back Workplace Inclusion. By Selena Hill / Black Enterprise
While companies may be changing the language surrounding DEI, the demand for fair and inclusive workplaces remains firmly in place.
Despite the Trump administration’s crackdown on corporate diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) programs, a new report suggests that workplace inclusion efforts are far from disappearing. According to a study released in May by Catalyst and New York University School of Law’s Meltzer Center for Diversity, Inclusion, and Belonging, 80% of U.S. organizations remain committed to workplace inclusion despite growing legal and political pressure surrounding DEI initiatives. Read more
Black Farmers Win Court Case That Restores $127 Million in Federal Grants. By Aallyah Wright / Capital B
The decision reinstates funding for organizations that say the USDA cuts threatened jobs and community programs.
Black farmers like Sharon Mallory can finally get some relief after a judge ruled to restore millions of dollars in grants. Earlier this year, the Trump administration yanked the money away from organizations led by and in support of Black farmers. Read more
Education
HBCUs’ Biggest Challenge in 2026? Having Too Many Students! By Asheea Smith / The Root
While HBCUs continue to experience a historic enrollment boom, decades of underfunding are colliding with surging demand. Here’s what you should know.
In the wake of the Supreme Court’s dismantling of affirmative action, historically Black colleges and universities (HBCUs) are experiencing a historic, record-shattering enrollment boom. Many campuses are now confronting an unexpected reality: Success is arriving faster than their infrastructure can keep up, and the shift is already taking a toll. Read more
This Is How Colleges Have Responded to the End of Race-Conscious Admissions. Jacquelyn Elias / The Chronicle of Higher Ed.
The nation’s 53 most selective institutions were far more likely than other colleges to see declines in the number of underrepresented minority students on their campuses in the wake of the Supreme Court’s 2023 decision in Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard, which banned the consideration of race in college admissions.
Nearly 70 percent of the most selective colleges — those that admitted fewer than 15 percent of applicants — saw the number of underrepresented minority students decline from the fall of 2022 to the fall of 2024, according to a new Chronicle analysis of institutional enrollment data. Underrepresented minorities at the nation’s most selective colleges decreased by 15 percent, and Black students did so by 26 percent since the court’s ruling. Read more
Related: I’m a professor at Berkeley. Bring back this requirement for entry. By Mina Aganagic / Wash Post
“Intellectual diversity” is Code for a “Conservative Quota.” By Nolan Cabrera / EduLedger
The U.S. Department of Education since late 2025 has been proposing to create an accreditation handbook purported to “support high-quality, high-value higher education.”
One core component of this reform is the enshrinement of intellectual diversity (sometimes “viewpoint diversity”), and alarm bells everywhere should be ringing. This call undermines the pursuit of truth and becomes a de facto affirmative action program for conservatives, but some historical context is necessary. Read more
World
What is in the Caribbean’s new slavery reparations manifesto? Reparations and reparative justice. By Natricia Duncan / The Guardian
One of the key outcomes of the recent reparations conference in Ghana was the launch of the Caribbean’s manifesto outlining the “moral, ethical and legal case for reparations” for the enslavement of African people. A wreath-laying event during the reparations conference in Accra, Ghana, last week.
The Caribbean Community Reparations Commission (CRC), which created the document, says it is a strengthening of an existing Caribbean Community (Caricom) 10-point plan for reparations from the UK and other former colonial powers, and a response to feedback from the public, organisations and political leaders. Read more
The Supreme Court Enables Trump’s Cruel Immigration Agenda. By Ruth Marcus / The New Yorker
Two new rulings make it easier for the Administration to prevent migrants from claiming asylum and to expel lawful refugees.
“Congress passed the Refugee Act in 1980 because it did not want this country to repeat the mistakes of its past,” Sotomayor wrote, joined only by the court’s two other liberals, Justices Elena Kagan and Ketanji Brown Jackson. “Yet if the refugees on the M.S. St. Louis were to walk up to a port of entry on our southern border today, the majority’s interpretation would allow immigration officers to refuse even to consider their asylum applications by physically blocking them from stepping foot onto U.S. soil. Read more
Ethics / Morality / Religion
What to the Christian Is the Fourth of July? By Myles Werntz / Christianity Today
And so, in that speech at Rochester, Douglass did not mince words. In his now-famous address titled “What to the Slave Is the Fourth of July?” he played on the pride and patriotism of America, likening the holiday to “what the Passover was to the emancipated people of God.”
Yet he used the occasion to highlight not his country’s faithfulness but its sin: The very tyrannies America opposed abroad it committed daily against slaves. The speech was a dire warning to a young nation quickly running out of excuses. Read more
Historic Black Churches Join In—and Opt Out of—America 250. By Randi Richardson / Christianity Today
Congregations that were stations in the Underground Railroad have mixed approaches to the nation’s birthday.
In the days leading up to America’s 250th anniversary, Mother Bethel African Methodist Episcopal (AME) Church is joining the festivities in Philadelphia. The cohort of churches is divided on whether to commemorate the semi quincentennial, with Mother Bethel opting to honor Black leaders while others sidestep the celebrations altogether. Read more
Southern Baptists’ resolutions reflect support of Christian nationalism, scholar says. By Adelle M. Banks / RNS
Earlier this month, the Southern Baptist Convention adopted resolutions opposing amnesty for undocumented immigrants and women in pastoral leadership roles.
The latest resolutions follow a decades-long trend toward conservatism. A new analysis by Boston University sociologist Nancy Ammerman found that Christian nationalist ideas have become the “lingua franca” of the denomination. Read more
Related: Texas Republicans may regret mandating Bible in classes. By Amanda Marcotte / Salon
What if mercy matters more than empathy? By Melissa Florer-Bixler / The Christian Century
Years before evangelicals began issuing warnings about “the sin of empathy,” Paul Bloom, a Yale psychologist, published a book warning against making ethical judgments based on identifying with others’ feelings. I read Against Empathy before I heard Christian conservatives warn that caring about LGBTQ people and immigrants led Christians to embrace anti-biblical public policy. But I had an uneasy intuition that Bloom was naming a real moral danger.
In anti-racism organizing, I’d witnessed what psychologists call the empathy gap: White people persistently underestimate the pain of Black people, with devastating consequences. Last year, Karrie Johnson was minutes away from giving birth and in obvious distress when a hospital nurse peppered her with questions and insisted that she complete her paperwork before being admitted. She’s not an exception. Health practitioners routinely downplay or ignore the reported pain of Black women like Johnson, leading to them being four times as likely to die in childbirth as White women. Read more
Historical / Cultural
‘I wish he had done more to free enslaved people’: Thomas Jefferson’s descendant on his family’s complex legacy. By David Smith / The Guardian
Shannon LaNier, Jefferson’s sixth great-grandson, reflects on his lineage and the role of African Americans in the nation’s founding
When the US turns 250 years old on Saturday, Shannon LaNier will be reckoning with a fundamental contradiction in its origin story – and his own. He is also a direct descendant of Sally Hemings, who was enslaved by Jefferson and bore several of his children. The exploitative relationship began after she joined him in Paris at the age of just 14 and lasted for decades. Read more
The Intimate Legacies of a White-Supremacist Coup. By Lauren Collins / The New Yorker
A racist takeover in Wilmington, North Carolina, in 1898, has reverberated across generations as a reminder of American democracy’s terrifying vulnerability.
I as born in Wilmington and lived there until I was eighteen, but I didn’t know much about 1898 until 2016, when I watched a documentary called “Wilmington on Fire,” directed by Christopher Everett. The film showed how white Democrats murdered Black men in the streets, banished Black leaders and their white Republican allies, and overthrew the city’s democratically elected biracial government, establishing a precedent of impunity for racial terrorism and solidifying Jim Crow. Read more
15 Caribbean music genres everyone should know and their origins. By Jahaura Michelle / The Grio
From reggae and soca to merengue and bouyon, here’s how these musical genres have shaped the region’s culture and influenced music globally.
The Caribbean has produced some of the world’s most recognizable music genres, from reggae and soca to salsa and reggaeton. Across the region, African, European and Indigenous influences blended over centuries to create sounds that continue to shape music worldwide. From Carnival anthems to folk traditions passed down through generations, these 15 Caribbean music genres tell the story of the people and cultures behind them. Read more
30 years after ‘Reasonable Doubt,’ Jay-Z’s career embodies hip-hop’s biggest contradictions. By Jabari M. Evans / The Conversation
“Reasonable Doubt” was not the first rap album I ever owned. But Jay-Z’s debut was the first hip-hop album I bought with my own money. More importantly, it was the first one I studied as a young writer who aspired to become a rapper, a dream that eventually came true.
Jay-Z sounded cool in a way that resembled a jazz musician more than a conventional rap star. He rapped with a quiet calm that also conveyed supreme confidence. His lyrics were layered, skillful and unorthodox. Read more
You’ll Have to Read Quincy Jones’s Autobiography to Believe It. By Hadley Hall Meares / Vanity Fair
The Autobiography of Quincy Jones is brimming with incredible anecdotes about the polymathic music savant, from his horrifically traumatic childhood to his work with Michael Jackson and encounters with everyone from Pablo Picasso to Tupac.
Quincy’s a guy whose success actually overshadows his talent,” the arranger Benny Carter once said. Truer words were never spoken. The winner of 28 Grammys, Jones was a music producer, band leader, composer, arranger, television producer, music executive, conductor, trumpet player, civil rights activist, philanthropist and all-around brilliant person. But in Jones’s dense and delightful 2001 autobiography, Q: The Autobiography of Quincy Jones, he focuses more on his friends and family than himself, even having those he loves write their own chapters about his life. Read more
Black Podcasting Is Having A Moment… That’s Becoming A Trend. By Frank Racioppi / Forbes
Black podcasters have forged a resilient, self-sustaining ecosystem, creating their own platforms despite comprising less than one percent of all podcasts.
They consistently outperform industry averages in publishing frequency and content depth, driven by a strong desire to share unique stories. Organizations like the Black Podcasting Awards celebrate these vital voices, while The Black Effect Podcast Network offers a significant platform and hosts festivals to foster community and business growth. Read more
Sports
Alyssa Thomas says WNBA players received death threats and racial slurs after Caitlin Clark incident. By Odafe Oghen / The Grio
The Phoenix Mercury star says the league failed to protect Black players following her suspension and criticized Commissioner Cathy Engelbert’s response
The fallout became public Tuesday when Thomas addressed reporters at the Mercury’s practice facility, saying the league’s silence in the face of threats against Black players is unacceptable. In 2024, theGrio reported on Thomas speaking out about racist and homophobic comments directed at WNBA players, when she said in 11 years in the league she had never experienced racial comments like those she received from Indiana Fever fans. Read more
Wimbledon will show growth of Black representation in tennis. By Andrew Jones / Andscape
The two tennis-playing mothers hosted an all-Black tennis players party in Paris, a scenario that would have elicited as much disbelief a decade ago — even in what was thought to be Venus and Serena Williams’ final playing chapters — as being told the White House was hosting a UFC fight card.
You could forgive someone if they forget one of the growing number of Black tennis standouts. That speaks to the growth of Black representation in tennis. It’s what the legacies of Althea Gibson and Ashe, after the racism and anti-Blackness they encountered, fully deserve. The pathway they laid led to the diligence of 1980s and 1990s flag bearers Zina Garrison, Lori McNeil, MaliVai Washington, Chanda Rubin and Ben Shelton’s father Bryan. Read more
Celtics Trade Jaylen Brown to East Rivals for 36-Year-Old Star as Fans Call It Worst Deal Since Mavs Traded Luka Doncic. By Shahul Hameed / Essentially Sports
The Boston Celtics just traded their Finals MVP, 29-year-old Jaylen Brown, who had a career year, to their biggest Eastern Conference rival, in exchange for a 36-year-old who has played only 78 games over the last two seasons.
For the Sixers, Brown comes in fresh off the best season of his career, finishing sixth in the MVP ladder. He recorded 28.7 points, 6.9 rebounds, and 5.1 assists per game last season. Now he joins Tyrese Maxey, Joel Embiid, and the rookie sensation VJ Edgecombe to give the 76ers a legitimate championship core. Read more
Related: ‘Excited and disappointed’: Jaylen Brown speaks out after trade to 76ers. By Nhari Djan / The Grio
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