Race Inquiry Digest (August 28) – Important Current Stories On Race In America

Feature – Warning signs of mass violence – in the US?  There are those who say that comparing President Donald Trump’s rhetoric to that of Adolf Hitler is alarmist, unfair and counterproductive. And yet, there has been no dearth of such comparisons since the 2016 presidential election. Many commentators have also drawn parallels between the conduct of Trump supporters and Holocaust-era Nazis. Read more  

Meet the New Klan, Same as the Old Klan (Almost). The Ku Klux Klan had its first revival in the ’20s, when membership soared in the North, and its faux populist rhetoric eerily anticipates the current model’s blather. Read more 

She Wants to Replace Confederate Statues With Statues of Black Heroes. Gabriel Koren’s Frederick Douglass and Malcolm X statues grace the streets of Harlem—and she’s urging every governor in America to erect more monuments to African-American heroes. Read more 

A Catastrophe for Houston’s Most Vulnerable People. Within cities, poor communities of color often live in segregated neighborhoods with higher flood risks. This is especially true in Houston. Read more 

Trump’s Pardon of Joe Arpaio ‘Is a Presidential Endorsement of Racism,’ ACLU Says. It was the first time Trump has used the power afforded to the presidency and, perhaps, the most controversial use of that power in modern history. Read more 

A black man went undercover online as a white supremacist. This is what he learned. “There are still people who think black people are not fully human and that we are lagging in terms of evolution. The comments I’d read about our facial features being monkey-like and dark skin being proof of primitiveness were shocking.” Read more  

Donald Trump’s Identity Politics. We know that it can’t have been just one thing, and that President Trump’s triumph was a concoction of many things. Nonetheless, several factors came together in a peculiar way, with serious electoral consequences. Millions of white voters began to see themselves more openly not as white supremacists but as white identified. Read more 

Donald Trump, ‘King of Alabama’? I think that if people want to understand what is happening here, to understand why Trump’s support is so strong in some quarters, we also need to look at Southern states that he carried by enormous margins. We have to look at states like Alabama. Read more  

Seeking justice for the mass hanging of black soldiers after the bloody 1917 Houston riots. A scene from the court-martial of 63 members of the all-black 24th Infantry on trial for mutiny and murder of 17 people in Houston on August 23, 1917. At the time, it was the largest murder trial in U.S. history. (W.C. Lloyd) Read more 

Even With Affirmative Action, Blacks and Hispanics Are More Underrepresented at Top Colleges Than 35 Years Ago. The share of black freshmen at elite schools is virtually unchanged since 1980. More Hispanics are attending elite schools, but the increase has not kept up with the huge growth of young Hispanics in the United States. Read more 

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