Race Inquiry Digest (February 26) – Important Current Stories On Race In America

Feature – Fanning the Flames of America’s Racial Tensions Is As Russian As Vodka and Blini. Russia used the U.S. history of racial oppression and its persistent challenges with systemic racism to manipulate  Americans’ electoral choices. Russian companies and bad actors “began to encourage U.S. minority groups not to vote in the 2016 U.S. presidential election or to vote for a third-party U.S. presidential candidate.” Read more 

Watch: What Audiences Miss In “Black Panther.” Danielle Young, writer and producer for The Root and Wilbert Cooper, senior editor at Vice, joined Salon’s D. Watkins to examine the historic cultural impact of the film and help all audiences understand some of important themes they might have missed. Watch here 

Where Billy Graham ‘missed the mark.’ The Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. electrified the nation when he gave his “I Have a Dream” speech, but there was another famous American pastor who was not impressed. He died last week at 99. Read more 

Black Hair’s Blockbuster Moment. In Wakanda, the techno-brilliant African nation of the Marvel film “Black Panther,” black warrior women don’t wear wigs.  Compelled to conceal her shaved head to carry off an undercover mission, General Okoye, played by Danai Gurira, calls her flowing wig “a disgrace” and discards it the instant she draws her spear to battle the bad guys. Read more 

Why is breast cancer mortality higher for African-American women than for white women?   White women in the U.S. are slightly more likely to develop breast cancer than black women – but less likely to die of it. Read more  

Trump and Parkland: Vicious racism as permission for violence. The killer wore a MAGA hat and expressed the same views as Trump’s worst supporters. Think that’s a coincidence? Read more 

Frederick Douglass’s Fight Against Scientific Racism. We should remember him as someone whose insights about scientific theories of race are every bit as relevant in our era as they were when he wrote them. Read more 

Lowest Ever Black Jobless Rate Is Still Twice That of Whites. The unemployment rate for black workers hit its lowest point on record recently. But even a strong labor market has limits in spreading opportunity widely. Read more 

For people of color, banks are shutting the door to home ownership. There’s a glass ceiling when it comes to people of color and housing loans. Read more  

To understand slavery, listen to the descendants. Michael Blakey is National Endowment for the Humanities professor of anthropology, Africana and American studies and director of the Institute for Historical Biology at the College of William & Mary. Read more

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