Race Inquiry Digest (April 29) – Important Current Stories On Race In America

Featured – The Neighborhood Is Mostly Black. The Home Buyers Are Mostly White. By Emily Badger, Quoctruing Bui, and Robert Gebeloff / NYT

Newly built homes in the South Park neighborhood of Raleigh are now going for $460,000. As recently as three years ago, this land held a vacant house. Nationwide, the arrival of white homeowners in places they’ve long avoided is jolting the economics of the land beneath everyone. Read more

‘I got a plan’: Elizabeth Warren takes on racial inequality with her policy proposals. MJ Lee and Kyung Lah / CNN

At a national gathering of women of color this week, Sen. Elizabeth Warren was confronted by this question the moment she took the stage: Black women are far more likely to die from pregnancy-related complications than white women — what will you do to address this crisis? Without skipping a beat, the Massachusetts Democrat diagnosed the root of the problem with one word: “Prejudice.” Read more

Democratic Candidates Pressed On Priorities By Women Of Color. By Scott Detrow / NPR

Eight Democratic presidential candidates faced the same basic question today in Houston: Why should women of color vote for them? The first-ever She The People Presidential Forum — organized by and centered on questions from women of color — served as a repeated reminder of the key role that minority women play in Democratic politics. Read more

What Joe Biden Hasn’t Owned up to About Anita Hill. By Jane Mayer / The New Yorker

Biden’s recent, half-hearted condolence call to Hill, and his subsequent statements, however, have reignited rather than quelled the controversy. Hill told the Times that she believed the issue isn’t politically disqualifying for Biden but that he needs to take more responsibility for the damage done not only to her but to other sexual-harassment victims. Read more

Selling Black and Brown Voters Down the River, One Fox News Town Hall at a Time. By Elie Mystal / The Nation

When reached for comment about the Democratic Party’s self-defeating quest to recapture the white Trump voter, Captain Ahab said: “Believe me, chasing white blowhards all over the map could cost the Democrats everything.” Read more

The return of Archie Bunker. By L. Benjamin Roisky / CNN

Since the 2016 presidential election, images, memes and stories involving the infamous television character Archie Bunker, the notoriously blunt, occasionally racist patriarch of Norman Lear’s iconic 1970s show “All in the Family,” have been circulating on the internet and across social media. For many, his reappearance indicates a sad state of affairs when it comes to American politics. Read more

White identity politics is about more than racism. By Sean Illing / Vox

I spoke to Ashley Jardina about the rise of white identity politics — why she believes America’s diversification has triggered a host of anxieties about who holds power and who does not, and what she thinks we can do to deal with the problems this anxiety has created. This is the argument Duke political scientist Ashley Jardina makes in her book White Identity Politics. Read more

Tennessee’s Vengeful Lawmakers. By Cliff Albright / NYT

After enormous black turnout in the 2018 midterms, Republicans are advancing a bill that would penalize voter registration drives. The Tennessee legislature will soon vote on a bill that is deliberately intended to suppress black turnout, even though Tennessee is among the five states with the lowest voter participation. Read more

University of Virginia basketball team will not celebrate championship at the White House. By Jamie Ehrlich / CNN

The University of Virginia men’s basketball team will not be celebrating its national championship with President Donald Trump at the White House, per a statement from the head coach released Friday. Coming to the White House, however, has been a controversial decision for some invited teams during the Trump administration. Read more

Making the Monument. By Nicolaus Mills / Dissent 

At the dedication for the Lincoln Memorial, President Harding portrayed Lincoln as the president who “maintained union and nationality” rather than the president who ended slavery. Changing the monument’s meaning took political struggle. Read more

The Art of Unruliness. By Joanna Scutts / The New Republic

The names of most of the characters in Saidiya Hartman’s book Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments are not familiar. They aren’t supposed to be. History rarely pays attention to the stories of “wayward” girls born into poverty, still less to their desires and dreams. Hartman’s subjects are girls and women who were part of the mass migration of African Americans to the north after Emancipation, who tried any way they could to resist being corralled into the narrow space allotted to them and called freedom. Read more

Big Money Enters Debate Over Race and Admissions at Stuyvesant. By Elizo Shapiro / NYT

Ronald Lauder and Richard Parsons want to keep the test for New York City’s elite schools, favoring other ways to increase the number of black and Hispanic students. Read more

California Senate OKs ban on hairstyle discrimination. By Associated Press

California could become one of the first states to outlaw racial discrimination because of hairstyles — such as braids and dreadlocks — in a move aimed at challenging long-held standards of professionalism in the workplace. Read more

Florida House Approves Requiring People To Repay Criminal Fines, Fees Before They Can Vote. By Sam Levine / HuffPost

“Disturbingly, this legislation will cause defacto lifetime disenfranchisement for large swaths of formerly incarcerated individuals who have completed their sentences — precisely the opposite of the entire purpose of Amendment 4,” Gross said in a statement. “This bill merely replaces one unjust system for another.” Read more

Texas Executes John William King For 1998 Dragging Death of James Byrd Jr. By Amy Russo / HuffPost

The avowed white supremacist was among three men convicted of dragging James Byrd Jr., a black man, to his death in a horrific hate crime. Read more

Black, Latino patients much more likely than whites to undergo amputations related to diabetes. By Anna Gorman / CNN

“Amputations are an unnecessary consequence of this devastating disease,” said Armstrong, professor of surgery at Keck School of Medicine of USC. “It’s an epidemic within an epidemic. And it’s a problem that’s totally ignored.” Read more

Police shooting near Yale exposes complex racial divide. By Erik Ortiz / NBC News

The images from the police bodycam video of two officers firing at an unarmed black couple in their car have reverberated throughout New Haven, Connecticut, where the shooting occurred last week, and across the suburban towns that circle the campus of Yale. Read more

Visit our home page for more articles. And at the top of this page register your email to receive notification of new editions of Race Inquiry Digest.  Click here for earlier Digests.