Featured
What Trump’s Legal Woes Mean to Black Americans. By Brandon Tensley / Capital B
A grand jury voted to indict the ex-president, but “if you’re white and have money, you can insulate yourself from a lot of accountability,” one historian says.
Rashad Robinson, the president of Color of Change, a civil rights group, echoed some of these sentiments.
“Trump’s time on the public stage has absolutely been marked by the deployment of racial resentment and hostility toward Black communities and pulling on this idea that when Black people reach and achieve certain platforms, despite all the barriers in our way, we don’t deserve it,” Robinson said. “Trump has done this for decades and decades — only to see his star rise.” Read more
Political / Social
Are Republicans Winning the War on Public Schools? By Grace Segers / TNR
GOP figures like Glenn Youngkin and Ron DeSantis believe “parents’ rights” rhetoric has made education a winning issue—but its potency may not last forever. Shown is Viginia Governor Glenn Youngkin.
“At the root of this, parents’ love and concern for their kids is the most powerful force in education,” said Jon Valant, director of the Brown Center on Education Policy at the Brookings Institute. “That can be used for good, or it can be exploited.” Read more
Related: Betsy DeVos Is Still Making Moves to Destroy Public Schools. By The Daily Beast
When Republicans Say They Want to Protect Children, Don’t Believe Them. By Jamelle Bouie / NYT
Here are a few of the things the Republican Party is prepared to do to protect children.
The Republican Party — in states like Tennessee, Oklahoma and Kentucky — is prepared to ban or strictly limit the public performance of drag and other gender-nonconforming behavior. The Republican Party is prepared to ban or strictly limit discussion of L.G.B.T.Q. people and identities in public schools, as well as transgender health care for minors, to protect them from what they say is manipulation and abuse. However in the wake of yet another school massacre — in Nashville, where a shooter killed three adults and three children at a private Christian school — Republicans refuse to do anything that might reduce the odds of another shooting or make it less likely that a child dies of gun violence. Read more
The Liberal Maverick Fighting Race-Based Affirmative Action.
For decades, Richard Kahlenberg has pushed for a class-conscious approach to college admissions. He may finally get his wish, but it comes at a personal cost.
In books, articles and academic papers, Mr. Kahlenberg has spent decades arguing for a different vision of diversity, one based in his 1960s idealism. He believes that had they lived, Kennedy and the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. would have pursued a multiracial coalition of poor and working class people, a Poor People’s Campaign that worked together toward the same goal of economic advancement in education, employment and housing. Read more
Related: Affirmative Action Is in Peril and ‘Model Minority’ Stories Don’t Help. By Serena Puang / NYT
Related: Harvard admits record number of Asian American applicants amid SCOTUS affirmative action fight. By Carl Samson / Yahoo News
The West Coast Think Tank Helping to Orchestrate DeSantis’s War on the Woke. By Jennifer C. Berkshire / The Nation
How the Claremont Institute is shaping the Sunshine State’s anti–civil rights and pro-patriarchy agenda
Claremont’s leaders have marshaled so much early support behind DeSantis because they see him as a staunch ally in thwarting the alleged march of “wokeism” through virtually every American institution: the media, corporations, and education, from pre-K through college. Read more
Mississippi Legislature votes to expand Capitol Police over objections in Jackson. By Jon Schuppe / NBC News
The expansion of the Mississippi Capitol Police to patrol all of Jackson was a centerpiece of efforts by mostly white Republican state officials to exert more control over law enforcement in the majority-Black, Democrat-led capital. Read more
Large share of Latinos don’t identify with current race categories, census Bureau numbers show. By Nicole Acevedo / NBC News
The findings come as the federal government is considering allowing Americans to check off “Hispanic or Latino” as their race as well as their ethnicity in the next census.
A large share of the U.S. Latino population doesn’t identify with any of the current racial categories in the census, according to new 2020 Census Bureau data that shows “major shifts” in how Americans who identify as Hispanic report their race. While almost 60% of the 54.6 million Americans who identified as Hispanic reported belonging to one racial group, such as white or Black, over a third (35.5%) of Latinos chose “Some Other Race” alone. This category is currently not recognized as a race by the federal government. Read more
Tim Scott’s Capitol Hill fans question his chances in 2024. By Marianne Levine / Politico
Take it from two fellow Republican senators who unsuccessfully ran for president: As much as they like their South Carolina colleague, the optimism pitch gets tricky with the party’s base.
The uncertainty over whether Scott can sell what Romney called “his own vision” sums up his unique place in the potential 2024 field: embodying optimism in a party more prone to elevating partisan fighters and grievance politics. Scott is the unquestionable primary frontrunner among fellow GOP senators who see him harkening back to the Ronald Reagan years — but the party’s base last responded to that tone in significant numbers when Reagan himself was on the ballot. Read more
Elon Musk’s Twitter pushes hate speech, extremist content into ‘For You’ pages. By Faiz Siddiqui and Jeremy B. Merrill / Wash Post
A Washington Post analysis found that accounts following dozens of Twitter handles pushing hate speech were subjected to an algorithmic echo chamber, in which Twitter fed additional hateful and racist content to users
Twitter is amplifying hate speech in its “For You” timeline, an unintended side effect of an algorithm that is supposed to show users more of what they want. According to a Washington Post analysis of Twitter’s recommendation algorithm, accounts that followed “extremists” — hate-promoting accounts identified in a list provided by the Southern Poverty Law Center — were subjected to a mix of other racist and incendiary speech. That included tweets from a self-proclaimed Nazi, for example, a user the account did not follow. Read more
Ethics / Morality / Religion
From Senate subcommittee to Easter sermon: Raphael Warnock on life as a pastor-politician. By Adelle M. Banks / RNS
‘My life is a sermon, that I get to preach on Sunday and embody and make come alive in my work in the Senate,’ said the Georgia senator.
From testifying to members of Congress about farming, to preaching Holy Week sermons from the pulpit of Atlanta’s famed Ebenezer Baptist Church, such is the back and forth life of the pastor-politician who won reelection to the Senate in 2022. The heir of that pulpit from the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., who was assassinated nearly 55 years ago on April 4, Warnock spoke to Religion News Service of how that day will always be a solemn one for him. Read more
Why My Church Partners With ‘He Gets Us.’ By Bryan Carter / Christianity Today
As a Black pastor, I appreciate how the diverse campaign helps my congregation reach our neighbors.
If you’re on Twitter, you’re used to seeing hot topics trend for a few days and eventually fade into Twittersphere history. But there’s one recent cultural moment that continues to elicit discussion and opinions from across the board—the He Gets Us commercials about Jesus that aired during the Super Bowl. The campaign’s 30-second ad called “Be Childlike” and a 60-second ad called “Love Your Enemies” were not preachy or heavy-handed—they simply conveyed the message that Jesus knows what it’s like to be human. And yet these ads have sparked a national conversation and have spurred strong reactions from every point on the political and theological spectrum. Read more
Martin Luther King Jr. Looks to God in New Statue. By Kate Shellnutt / Christianity Today
Supporters pray new monument depicting the civil rights leader as a preacher will be part of a bigger revival for peace and unity
On Monday, Kathy Fincher looked into Martin Luther King Jr.’s eyes and knew something wasn’t quite right. The statue of King that she had been working on for years is said to be the first to portray the civil rights leader and preacher wearing robes and holding a Bible. For Fincher, the design relies on King’s heavenward gaze, on the eyes that “have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord,” as he said in his 1968 “I’ve Been to the Mountaintop” speech. Read more
Pilgrimage and revolution: How Cesar Chavez married faith and ideology in landmark farmworkers’ march. By Lloyd Daniel Barba / The Conversation
On March 31, 1966, labor rights pioneer Cesar Chavez wasn’t celebrating his birthday in any usual manner. Rather, he was 14 days into a 25-day pilgrimage in California from Delano to Sacramento.
As a scholar of religion and the farmworkers movement, I believe Chavez’s endeavor was not simply a “march” or “protest” – although workers’ rights were, of course, central to the event. Rather, it was a “pilgrimage,” and to overlook the religious dimensions is to fundamentally misunderstand what Chavez was trying to achieve. Read more
Historical / Cultural
Enslaved people built Davidson College and its campus. A new memorial will honor them. By Anna Maria Della Costa / The Charlotte Observer
Enslaved people made the bricks for Davidson College’s original buildings, farmed the campus’ land and served its students and faculty.
Nearly two centuries later, the private liberal arts college is taking another step toward reconciling with its past. Davidson President Doug Hicks announced plans Thursday morning for a memorial to honor the enslaved and exploited people who helped build the college. A bronze sculpture — two large, work-worn hands — will sit among four campus buildings fashioned from those bricks in the mid-1800s. Read more
What We’ll Be Celebrating When Harriet Tubman Appears on the 20-Dollar Bill. By Clarence Lusane / The Nation
American abolitionist leader Harriet Tubman (1820–1913), who led over 300 escaped enslaved people to freedom, including her parents, through the underground railroad. (MPI / Getty Images)
Constantly underestimated, she risked her life and freedom to liberate others and was committed to building a political system that endowed women and people of color with the same rights as white men. In a history-making step, enslaved-liberator and abolitionist Harriet Tubman is scheduled to appear on the $20 dollar bill around 2030. Despite the reluctance that was clearly evinced by former president Donald Trump to proceed with the project. Read more
Zora Neale Hurston’s Anthropological Legacy. By Ida E. Jones / AAIHS
Zora Neale Hurston, Belle Glade, Florida, 1935 (Picryl)
“Today Hurston’s legacy as a popular culture figure and writer seems firmly secure. However, her “twice as much praise or twice as much blame” presaged a quality of the critical reception her work in the U.S. academy” (2). Freeman Marshall’s Ain’t I an Anthropologist Zora Neale Hurston Beyond the Literary Icon, “explores [Hurston’s] popular appeal as iconography, her elevation into the literary canon, her concurrent marginalization in anthropology, and her significant, though often overlooked, contributions to American anthropology” (2). Read more
Progressives Have Failed to Heed LBJ’s Final Warning. By Mark K. Updegrove / Time
Fifty years ago, on December 12, 1972, former President Lyndon Johnson gave what would be his final speech, six weeks before his death from a heart attack.
He delivered the remarks at a civil rights symposium he had convened at his presidential library in Austin, Texas, where leaders from the Civil Rights Movement had come to mark the progress made over the last decade and to take a hard look at the racial injustice that continued to plague America. While the former president spoke proudly of the advances in civil rights that had come during the course of his administration, he used his remarks not to advance his own legacy, nor to simply say that more needed to be done, but to say that he himself hadn’t done enough. Read more
R&B star Kem bares his soul for a memoir “soaked in the blues.” By Curtis Bunn / NBC News
“Great healing and transformation are taking place in my life because somebody shared their story with me,” says Kem, who hopes sharing his story will help others too.
By the time he was 19, the Grammy-nominated R&B star Kem was homeless, addicted to alcohol and drugs, and meandering aimlessly in and around Detroit seeking his next high. Decades later, his story, he writes in his revealing memoir, “Share My Life,” which comes out April 4, is “a tale soaked in the blues.” Read more
53 Years After Miles Davis’s Album, a Fresh Spin as ‘London Brew.’ By Marcus J. Moore / NYT
A 12-member collective of noted U.K.-based musicians used “Bitches Brew” as a springboard, improvising a new LP after the pandemic thwarted a 50th anniversary celebration for the original.
The LP convenes a 12-member collective of noted musicians in Britain — including the saxophonists Nubya Garcia and Shabaka Hutchings, the tuba player Theon Cross, the D.J. Benji B and the guitarist Dave Okumu — and uses “Bitches Brew” as a springboard to a new album informed by the Davis classic without recreating it. The idea was to improvise an album with the same fiery expanse, with samples from Davis’s electric period of the late 1960s and early ’70s as the binding agent. Read more
Sports
For Black Athletes, March Madness Has Much Higher Stakes. By Derrick Z. Jackson / The Root
Of the 68 schools in March Madness, including Tennessee, Duke, Kentucky, Kansas, more than 50 percent graduate less than half of their Black recruits
If you watch the National Collegiate Athletic Association’s Division 1 Men’s basketball tournament for pure sports entertainment, fine. If you watch to cheer your alma mater, I understand. If you watch because on any given night, a Lilliputian like Florida Atlantic can topple a Tennessee and Kansas State on its way to the Final Four, I get it as an ex-sportswriter. Just don’t think it’s anything more than that. The Cinderella stories cannot hide the rotten pumpkins that litter the landscape. The pretense that the sport has anything to do with education—especially for Black men—is as absurd as ever. Read more
Lamar Jackson’s Sin: Not Playing Their Game. By Dave Zirin / The Nation
The incredibly talented quarterback can’t find a new team. It reveals the ugly way NFL owners do business.
For many commentators, the problem is that Jackson has been using his mother as an agent. He also asked an uncertified agent, a family friend, to reach out to teams, which is against the league’s collective bargaining agreement. But none of this is likely why Jackson isn’t getting any offers. The real reason is likely about punishment. In a league that believes in top-down autocracy, Jackson is not playing by the owner’s rules. To NFL owners, he might as well be taking a knee during the anthem. It’s not about the politics. It’s about the political economy of a league segregated racially by those who play and those who own, as former player Michael Bennett wrote so memorably. It is a league that demands obedience, and Jackson refuses to be obedient. Read more
LeBron James opened a Starbucks, but it’s providing much more than coffee. By Joe Vardon / The Athletic
At 6 o’clock Wednesday morning, a new Starbucks opened for the first time on West Market Street, next door to a bank and a parking garage, and across from a couple of brick, vacant storefronts, some with boarded-up windows, on the outskirts of downtown. There is no Starbucks quite like it in the world.
The 46 people who work there are all being paid an hourly salary, but on top of the money are earning valuable job-training certificates for the hospitality industry. It’s an entirely new way to think about job training, which is typically done at community colleges and vocational schools where the students aren’t being paid for the pieces of paper they get that they hope one day opens a door for them into the career field of their choice. Read more
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