Race Inquiry Digest (March 8) – Important Current Stories On Race In America

Feature – Mass shooters: Part of a larger epidemic of white male rage. Mass shooters should be understood, it seems, as the radical edge of a larger trend of celebratory sadism spiked with right-wing politics — a great boiling-over of rage from young and disaffected white men who believe they are victims and take great glee in trying to dominate, abuse and even assault others. This brings up extremely serious questions about the role the larger conservative movement is playing in allowing this toxicity to fester and grow. Read more 

White Teachers with Guns. Think about LaQuan McDonald, Jordan Edwards, and Tamir Rice. All were killed by police officers “trained” to use guns and de-escalate situations. What would make anyone believe that teachers will do better—even with training? Read more 

How It Feels to Be a Problem. That’s W.E.B. Du Bois, sociologist, historian, writer, and one of the co-founders of the NAACP, writing for The Atlantic in 1897. His article, “Strivings of the Negro People,” addresses the alienation experienced by emancipated slaves and their families three decades later—or, in his words, “the freedman [who] has not yet found in freedom his promised land.” The article has been excerpted and animated in a video. See the video here 

San Francisco To Remove 19th Century Statue Critics Say Degrades Native Americans. The sculpture “Early Days” sits near San Francisco’s City Hall. It depicts a Sir Francis Drake and Catholic missionary Junipero Serra standing over a sitting Native American. Read more 

Martin Luther King Jr. Saw Three Evils in the World. King, addressed The Hungry Club, in Atlanta, on May 10, 1967. He acknowledged that progress had been made in civil rights, but warned that the “evils” of racism, poverty, and the Vietnam War endangered further gains for black Americans. Read more 

How Liberals Can Reclaim Nationalism. To effect this transformation is one of the great political challenges of our age. It requires principled resistance to right-wing nationalism, but it can succeed only if those who are most open to diversity abandon their hostility to other forms of nationalism. Read more 

Black politics 2.0: The post-Obama generation is so done with the Democratic Party’s old ways. Black political strategists, activists and candidates are pushing the Democratic Party to change the paradigm on how it views black voters and their contributions to the party. They want more respect and more representation, and many want black voters to also build their own political power structures. Read more 

New report looks at women of color in journalism and the lack of diversity in U.S. newsrooms. Joy Reid is one of the journalist who shares her experiences in the new report, “The Status of Women of Color in the U.S. News Media 2018.” Read more 

“The Oscars Are Still So White”: While Awards Project Diversity, Most Winners Remain White Men. The 90th Academy Awards were held Sunday night, where the vast majority of the awards went to white men, despite years of activism demanding increased racial and gender diversity in Hollywood. Read more

I’m Raising A Biracial Daughter In Japan, Where She’s Surrounded By Blackface. I live in Tokyo, in a homogenous society where 98.5 percent of the population is Japanese. My wife Haruki is Japanese, and my 4-year-old daughter Kantra is the only black girl in her preschool class. Read more 

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