Featured

Is America Becoming a Terrorist State? By Ronald J. Sheehy, Editor/ On Race in America

When violence becomes policy, the United States risks becoming a threat to the international order.

A government that uses murder, kidnapping, and intimidation as instruments of policy crosses a dangerous threshold. History gives such systems a name: terrorist states, or authoritarian regimes. From Hitler’s Germany and Stalin’s Soviet Union to Pol Pot’s Cambodia, the twentieth century showed how state violence—once justified and normalized—can expand to a scale previously unimaginable. Read more

The Week’s Top Stories

Political / Social

Trump’s gains among Black voters erode as economic promises fade. By Nnamdi Egwuonwu and Akayla Gardner / MS Now

“I’m a capitalist. I vote green; I don’t vote red or blue,” Beasley said at a recent gala hosted by the Black Conservative Federation, where hundreds of Black Trump supporters gathered to celebrate the president’s historic gains with their community.

But even as they toasted Trump’s success — he won more than 2 in 10 Black male voters, the highest share for a Republican presidential candidate since at least Gerald Ford in 1976 — many of the attendees expressed uncertainty about what comes next. And the man Black conservatives credit as singularly responsible for expanding the party’s tent will not be on the ballot in 2026 — Trump. Read more

It Can Now Be Plainly Said: Trump Is Planning a November Coup d’État. By Michael Tomasky / TNR

The Washington Post—and yes, there’s still good reporting going on there—reported Thursday that pro-Trump “activists” (a rather generous and perverse use of that word, I think) who say they’re working with the Trump administration “are circulating a 17-page draft executive order that claims China interfered in the 2020 election as a basis to declare a national emergency that would unlock extraordinary presidential power over voting.”

The plan would mandate voter ID and ban mail-in balloting, and calls on Trump to issue an executive order announcing both measures. Read more

How Trump Will Fill His Gulags. By Pema Levy / Mother Jones

DHS is rewriting its detention rules to ignore the law—and entrap millions.

The Trump administration’s treatment of refugees and other immigrants echoes the dual-state model. People who were protected by the laws are suddenly subject to arrest and detainment, possibly for a long time. The scaffolding of their rights is collapsing, and they are now subject to the dark underbelly of Trump’s lawless detention regime. “ICE is the face of a prerogative state, emerging or actual,” Evan Bernick, a constitutional law professor at Northern Illinois University College of Law, explained to me last year. “It swoops in, it ignores safeguards, you can’t escape it.” Read more

Black America Explodes After Trump Fires Kristi Noem. By Phenix S Halley / The Root

Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem, who oversaw ICE and the enforcement of immigration laws, including border security and counter-terrorism initiatives, was fired, a move widely applauded by Black Americans and many Democratic leaders, both Black and white, who had criticized her tenure and called for a complete overhaul of the department’s controversial policies.

The Thursday (March 5) decision was reportedly due to Noem making Trump look bad during a recent hearing, according to Reuters. However, many Black people online felt she deserved the outcome. Read more

In the Texas Primaries, a Good Night for James Talarico, and a Bad One for John Cornyn. By Benjamin Wallace-Wells / The New Yorker

Democrats have not won a statewide race in Texas in more than thirty years, but on Tuesday night they seemed to have found an interesting prospect.

Thirty-six-year-old state representative and seminarian James Talarico, a religious progressive who emphasized the decency of ordinary conservatives and who seemed intent on elevating political discourse to a slightly spectral plane. Talarico proved unusually eloquent, impressing figures as diverse as the podcaster Joe Rogan and the former President Barack Obama. “Really talented young man,” Obama said. “Now more than ever, what people long for is some core integrity.” Read more

Formerly incarcerated Black men say they’re ‘doing OK’ while trying to cope with depression and PTSD. By Helena Addison / The Conversation

“People can assess me, interview me, incarcerate me, observe me, and they can think they know what I need,” said Shawn, a man in his early 50s who spent 15 years in and out of prison. “And that can be an educated assessment, but at the end of the day, I live inside of this body, inside of this head. I know what I need.”

Shawn is one of 29 formerly incarcerated Black men living in Philadelphia I interviewed as part of my research on coping with the mental health effects of imprisonment. His name and the names of other people quoted in this article are pseudonyms chosen to protect their privacy. Read more

Education

How to Fix the Broken Black Male Teacher Pipeline. By Jacob Easley / Eduledger

Black men now represent only about 2% of teachers nationwide — a noticeable drop from 6.5% in the 2017-2018 school year. The declining presence of Black male teachers in classrooms tells us in no uncertain terms: the nation struggles to recruit and keep male teachers of color.

Studies confirm that educators of color serve as cultural connectors and can positively impact Black students’ academic success, aspirations, and the school environment. Black students who encounter at least one Black teacher during elementary school are statistically more likely to finish high school and attend college. In essence, teachers of color matter. Read more

‘Excellence’: Smithsonian exhibit celebrates HBCUs amid attacks on Black history. By Adria R. Walker / The Guardian

At a time when museums and colleges are facing uncertainty and there is a push to limit the acknowledgment of Black history, the Smithsonian’s National Museum of African American History and Culture (NMAAHC) and its five partner historically Black colleges and universities (HBCUs) have launched a new exhibit to put Black history and Black archives at the forefront.

At the Vanguard: Making and Saving History at HBCUs, on view at the NMAAHC now through 19 July, was developed as a part of the History and Culture Access Consortium (HCAC). After At the Vanguard leaves the NMAAHC, it will go on tour to each of the universities, along with other locations that request it. Read more

What Will Be Left After the University of Texas Destroys Itself? By Aaron Boehmer / The Nation

UT-Austin has collapsed its race, ethnic, and gender studies into a single program while a new policy asks faculty to avoid “controversial” topics. But the attacks won’t end there.

In 2023, Texas Governor Greg Abbott signed Senate Bill 17 into law, banning diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives at public institutions across the state. In the years since, the University of Texas at Austin has been steadily remaking itself in the image demanded by conservative legislators across town. The university’s most recent changes include the consolidation of African and African Diaspora Studies, Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies, American Studies, and Mexican American and Latina/o Studies into a single “Social and Cultural Analysis” department, as well as a UT system-wide policy asking faculty to avoid “controversial” topics in the classroom. While the shift seems sudden, these attacks are in line with an ant-DEI, right-wing agenda that has been years in the making. Read more

ProPublica Sues Education Department for Withholding Records About Discrimination in Schools. By Jennifer Smith Richards and Jodi S. Cohen / Propublica

The agency’s Office for Civil Rights aims to protect millions of students from being discriminated against based on disability, race and gender. Under Education Secretary Linda McMahon, that work has become cloaked in secrecy, the lawsuit alleges.

ProPublica has sued the U.S. Department of Education in federal court in New York, accusing it of withholding public records about how it’s enforcing civil rights protections for millions of American students. The Education Department has failed to provide public records related to its investigations, communications and other work that ProPublica sought through four Freedom of Information Act requests filed last year. Read more

GOP-Run Florida University Group Chat Devolved Into Racism and Talk of Violence. By Chris Walker / Truthout

The chat logs are eerily similar to leaked conversations among Young Republicans last fall.

Leaked chats from a Republican group at a Florida college contain hundreds of uses of the n-word and frequent references to Nazi Germany, new reporting from The Miami Herald has revealed. The group chat was started by Miami-Dade Republican Party Secretary Abel Carvajal last fall to promote Republican-aligned events at Florida International University (FIU). But within just a few weeks, the Whatsapp group was rife with racism, antisemitism, misogyny, and homophobic slurs. Read more

World

“Iran Is Not Going to Surrender”: Johns Hopkins Prof. Says U.S. and Israel Underestimate Iran. By Amy Goodman / Democracy Now

The U.S.-Israeli war on Iran is now in its fifth day. Following the assassination of Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei, Israel has made it clear that it intends to target any official successors.

Despite U.S. hopes for a short engagement, however, Iran appears to be settling in for a “war of attrition” against “the biggest military superpower in world history, and the only nuclear-armed state in the Middle East,” says scholar Narges Bajoghli. “This could turn into a regional war of a scale that will make the past 25 years of forever wars in the Middle East seem like a walk in the park.” Read more

The No-Explanation War. By Jay Capian Kang / The New Yorker

If you never have to explain yourself, you can’t really ever be wrong. In recent decades, few things have been as famously wrong as the political theatre surrounding the Iraq War.

The Trump Administration, in contrast, has, in its own approach to war, simply skipped the explaining phase. To date, the only explanations offered by the Administration have been confusing more than anything else. “We didn’t start this war,” the Secretary of War, Pete Hegseth, said at a press conference on Monday, pointing out that President Trump, Marco Rubio, Jared Kushner, and the special envoy Steve Witkoff—evidently, the Iran negotiating team—had “bent over backwards for real diplomacy.” He also said that Iran had a “conventional gun to our head,” reiterating that America had no choice but to go on the offensive. Read more

Trump Opens the Pandora’s Box of Assassination. By Tim Naftali / The Atlantic

Killing anyone without a trial, let alone a foreign leader, involves a moral choice.

On Saturday, the United States, in a joint operation with Israel, killed Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. For the first time in the postwar era, Washington has succeeded in killing a foreign leader—shattering a precedent that had been sustained for decades by a mix of moral, political, and logistical concerns. Read more

Cuba’s Tourism Industry Is Collapsing as U.S. Moves Deter Travel. By Frances Robles and Vjosa Isai / NYT

The Trump administration’s decision to cut off foreign oil to the island is devastating its tourism industry, a key source of income for a government being pushed to the edge. Tourists in an old American car used as a taxi last month in Havana.

Airlines sent empty jets to the island to take thousands of tourists back home, a stark sign of the volatile conditions in Cuba as the Trump administration’s campaign has created an increasingly desperate situation for Cuba and its people. Abandoned trucks, cars and motorbikes, apparently out of gas, littered the road to the airport, Ms. Sutherland said. Read more

Americans Are Leaving the U.S. in Record Numbers. By Drew Hinshaw and Joe Parkinson / WSJ

In its 250th year, is America, land of immigration, becoming a country of emigration?

Last year the U.S. experienced something that hasn’t definitively occurred since the Great Depression: More people moved out than moved in. The Trump administration has hailed the exodus—negative net migration—as the fulfillment of its promise to ramp up deportations and restrict new visas. Beneath the stormy optics of that immigration crackdown, however, lies a less-noticed reversal: America’s own citizens are leaving in record numbers, replanting themselves and their families in lands they find more affordable and safe. Read more

Ethics / Morality / Religion

Johnson: US Must Wage War With Iran Because of Its “Misguided Religion.” By Sharon Zhang / Truthout

Johnson, Rubio, and Hegseth have made openly Islamophobic comments in remarks advocating for the war.

“Mike Johnson’s claim that Iranians follow a ‘misguided religion’ that leads them to hate America is a dangerous, irresponsible and hypocritical expression of bigotry that is completely inappropriate for the Speaker of the House,” said the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) in a statement calling for Johnson to retract his remarks. Read more

James Talarico is living up to the hype — by staying true to his faith. By Guthrie Graves-Fitzsimmons / MS Now

Talarico has a lot of powerful qualities, but his unapologetic embrace of his Christian faith sets him apart from other rising Democratic stars — and it could maybe even help reshape American politics.

Before his Senate run, Talarico gained national attention as a state representative by rooting his opposition to Christian nationalism in his own Christian faith. During legislative battles over whether the Ten Commandments should be posted in public schools and guidance counselors should be replaced with unlicensed religious chaplains, he defended religious freedom without casting religion as the enemy. Read more

The Catholic Bishops Who Wrote a Scorching Brief Against Trump. By Matt Ford / TNR

The president’s take on birthright citizenship doesn’t pass legal muster. To hear the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops tell it, it’s a moral affront as well.

While the bishops make some legal arguments, they are ultimately secondary to the moral and spiritual ones contained in the text. “At its core, this case is not solely a question about citizenship status or the Fourteenth Amendment,” they argued. “It is a question of whether the law will affirm or deny the equal worth of those born within our common community—whether the law will protect the human dignity of all God’s children.” Read more

In new books, Black church leaders share history and hope. By Adelle M. Banks / RNS

Released during or close to Black History Month, the books provide a faith-oriented look at African American history and analyses of women in ministry and changing demographics and technology.

Kimber’s is one of three new books by prominent Black denominational leaders that examine the role of the Black church and the work of its clergy and lay people — all historical analyses pegged to Black History Month, but all of them vibrant with the experience of authors who have watched the Black church’s evolution over their decades of ministry. Read more

Historical / Cultural

Historians resist Trump’s effort to police the past. By Chauncey Devega / Salon

Donald Trump is an instinctive authoritarian. This is the defining feature of his personality and political life. Since his return to power, he has become much more extreme, ambitious and dangerous. Such leaders know that controlling the past is how you win the present — and lay the groundwork for commanding the future. These types of bad actors will never be satisfied in their quest to remake society in their ideological and personal image. Shown is Andrew Jackson’s portrait in the Oval Office.

This explains why authoritarians and other enemies of democracy systematically target schools, universities, science, the arts, libraries, the independent news media and Fourth Estate, museums — anywhere knowledge is produced and critical thinking is taught. To control society, you must first control how people think. But such attempts are almost always contested. Read more

A film honors America’s first self-governed town founded by formerly enslaved people. By Adria R. Walker / The Guardian

The Spirit We Move With explores the legacy of Mitchelville on Hilton Head Island and its Gullah Geechee community. Penn Center, the first school for formerly enslaved people in the US.

In 1862, while the American civil war spread across the country, formerly enslaved people on Hilton Head Island in South Carolina were imagining a new future and envisioning new possibilities. They began organizing themselves and eventually created the first self-governed, autonomous city for freed people. It was called Mitchelville, named for the Union army Maj Gen Ormsby Mitchel, who led what would become known as the Port Royal Experiment, a model for how the country might transition away from slavery that served as a precursor to the Reconstruction period. Read more

Reparations advocates push for payments to Black Americans despite budget and legal challenges. By Joshua Q. Nelson / Fox News

Cincinnati NAACP president urges people not to be opposed to the term ‘reparation’ as other cities deal with legal pressure and funding issues.

“I think people get confused and caught up with the word ‘reparation,'” Whitehead said. “It’s restoring people that have been unfairly treated.” Whitehead’s comments coincided with city talks regarding a new reparations program. The program would offer assistance to “low-to-moderate income residents” and “any individual or family member of an individual who was prevented from buying a home due to discriminatory practices,” the Cincinnati Enquirer reported. Read more

Bernard LaFayette, Freedom Rider and Selma voting rights organizer, dies at 85. By Travis Loller / AP and PBS

Bernard LaFayette, the advance man who did the risky groundwork for the voter registration campaign in Selma, Alabama, that culminated in the passage of the Voting Rights Act of 1965, has died.

On March 7, 1965, the beating of future congressman John Lewis and voting rights marchers on Selma’s Edmund Pettus Bridge led the evening news, shocking the nation’s conscience and pushing Congress to act. But two years before “Bloody Sunday,” it was LaFayette who quietly set the stage for Selma and the advances in voting rights that would follow. Read more

Henrietta Lacks’ family reaches second settlement with pharmaceutical brand for ‘stolen’ cells. By Haniyah Philigene / The Grio

For years, pharmaceutical brands have profited from cells taken from Henrietta Lacks without her consent. Now her family is seeking justice.

In 1951, Henrietta Lacks, a 31-year-old Black woman, went to Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore seeking care for cervical cancer. As she sought care, her cervical cells were harvested without her consent and have laid a foundation for revolutionary scientific research for Covid-19 vaccines, cancer treatments, the flu, Parkinson’s, and more. And in recent years, Lacks’ family has been seeking justice for the stolen cells that big pharmaceutical companies have profited from for years. With the assistance of attorney Ben Crump, the family reached its second settlement in a series of lawsuits holding Big Pharma accountable for its unlawful procurement of her cells, known as “HeLa cells,” and their use in scientific research. Read more

Trayvon Martin and Other Black Men, Women Unjustly Killed. By Phenix S. Halley / The Root

14 years after Trayvon Martin was killed, these other Black men and women were also murdered in shocking similarity.

Over 14 years have passed since 17-year-old Trayvon Martin was gunned down in his own neighborhood in Florida. But while his tragic killing sparked a world-wide movement to protect young Black men and women, we’d be lying if we said there haven’t been other Trayvon Martins, whose murders continue to haunt the Black community. Read more

2026 NAACP Image Awards Best Moments and Surprises. By Shanelle Genai / The Root

The 57th annual NAACP Image Awards went off without a hitch and was truly home to some much-needed blackity-black surprises and highlights! Let’s get into it!

And just like annual cookouts and our grandmama’s pound cake, it was an extremely Black and beautiful affair! From Viola Davis and Colman Domingo taking home the prestigious Chairman’s and President’s Award, respectively to Salt-N-Pepa getting inducted into the NAACP Image Awards Hall of Fame, there was more than enough amazing things that went down. But if you didn’t get a chance to catch the show live, catch our breakdown for some of the best moments and highlights of the night! Read more

Sports

The Rebirth of a Negro Leagues Landmark. By Sports Illustrated / YouTube

Hinchliffe Stadium stands as one of the last remaining Negro Leagues ballparks in America.

In this episode of Stadium Wonders, Sports Illustrated explores the history, cultural significance and remarkable restoration of the historic New Jersey landmark. From its role in Negro Leagues history to its long awaited revival, this is the story of a stadium that refused to be forgotten just as a new baseball season begins. Watch here

Kobe Bryant and the secret history of the black mamba. By Baxter Holmes / ESPN

Humphrey, who had worked at Nike since 1994, quickly prepared a presentation that featured the snake as the centerpiece of a new sneaker campaign. Alongside photos of the snake were videos of the NBA star attacking the basket.

From there, it was time to create a global campaign featuring the black mamba, and present it to the player who would ultimately represent it. That player was Michael Jordan. How a shoe and persona designed for Jordan became Bryant’s instead reveals an alternate reality — one of the most remarkable untold stories in the history of sports marketing, advertising and apparel. Read more

Novak Djokovic Makes Feelings Clear on Serena Williams’ Silence Over Comeback Talks. Supriyo Sarkar / Essentially Sports

Few comeback stories in sport carry the electricity felt when Michael Jordan reappeared in the NBA wearing No. 45. Now similar intrigue swirls around Serena Williams, as whispers grow louder that the tennis icon may lace up again. Even Novak Djokovic, rarely one to reveal much emotion, has found it hard to conceal his excitement over the tantalizing possibility.

The latest wave of speculation began months ago. In the fall of 2025, Serena quietly re-entered the International Tennis Integrity Agency’s registered testing pool. That step is required for players who want to compete again professionally. The process involves random drug testing and daily whereabouts reporting. Players must also complete a six-month compliance period before returning to competition. Williams officially met that requirement on Feb. 22, 2026. Read more

NFL’s Black assistant coaches need support. The NFLPA should speak up. By William C. Rhoden / Andscape

During a recent conversation about Black head coaches in the NFL, Rod Graves, the outgoing executive director of the Fritz Pollard Alliance Foundation, suggested that players would help the cause by advocating more vocally for the Black assistant coaches they work with. Shown is Denver Broncos defensive coordinator Vance Joseph.

You would think that in a league with so many Black star players it would be natural for them to openly credit the assistants who play such a significant role not only on the field but often off the field in their personal lives. This does not always happen. Read more

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