Race Inquiry Digest (February 12) – Important Current Stories On Race In America

Feature – How Joy Reid of MSNBC Became a Heroine of the Resistance. The daughter of immigrants, she spars fiercely with supporters of President Trump, both on the air and in the Twitter ether. Read more . Also see, by Joy Reid, Republican Rule, Week 55: There Is No Bottom to This Bottom. 

White Women Who Enable Trump Do Not Deserve The Benefit Of Your Doubt. They are part of Trump’s base, his funders and his administration. Yet they continue to get a pass for the far-reaching, generational damage they are helping Trump to unleash on this country, and particularly on black and brown people. Read more 

Bigger Than Ever, And More Diverse: Team USA At The 2018 Winter Olympics. Team USA is nearly 45 percent female, putting it slightly above the average for all countries competing in Pyeongchang. The U.S. squad includes 10 African-Americans, 11 Asian-Americans and its first two openly gay athletes. Read more 

‘Black Panther’ Brings Hope, Hype and Pride. Now there you have every black boy’s fantasy. He is richer than Bill Gates, smarter than Elon Musk, better looking than Denzel.” And with vibranium, “he is the hereditary ruler of the richest nation on Earth. Read more 

Watch Kendrick Lamar, SZA’s Vibrant New ‘All the Stars’ Video. Kendrick Lamar and SZA unveiled a striking new video for their new collaboration, “All the Stars,” which will appear on the Lamar-curated soundtrack for Marvel’s Black Panther. Watch here 

‘Black Panther’ Is Ready To Take Dark-Skinned Actresses (And Colorism) Seriously.  Based on everything we know about colorism, who it affects, and what exactly feeds into it, we wouldn’t expect that many (or really any) dark-skinned and brown-skinned actresses would appear in “Black Panther.” Read more 

Desegregating blood: A civil rights struggle to remember. Never mind that scientists saw no relationship between race and blood and that one of the world’s leading authorities on blood banking at the time, and the director of the Red Cross’s pilot blood program, was an African-American scientist named Dr. Charles Drew. Read more 

King’s ‘Letter from Birmingham Jail’ explains the rage over the NFL anthem protests and the persistence of racial injustice. What they have done is in the tradition of nonviolent protest. It forces people to have a conversation,” she said. “But the pushback has been ugly. It’s like, ‘We’re sick of you, the nerve of the NFL players.’ They are like the outsiders that the clergy mentioned in going after King.” Read more 
The Arming and Disarming of Black America. When black Americans finally won their Second Amendment rights, white Southerners wielded their own more anarchically than ever before. Read more 

Remember the Orangeburg Massacre. It marked the first time in U.S. history that students were killed by police on their own campus, according to sociologists Charles Gallagher and Cameron Lippard, and it presaged the ruthlessness with which the state would repress the rising Black Power movement in the months and years to follow. Read more 
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