Race Inquiry Digest – May 1

Feature – The NFL’s racial divide. The story of the enduring blackness of the running back position is part of a much bigger narrative about race and football that dates to a period when African-Americans were unofficially banned from playing in the NFL. Read more 

Barack Obama has a powerful voice. He shouldn’t use it for paid speeches. A Wall Street firm will pay the former president $400,000 for a speech. This kind of kowtowing to the billionaire class has left the Democrats morally bankrupt. Read more 

This Year’s May Day Protests Aren’t Just About Labor. A coalition of nearly 40 advocacy groups, are holding rallies across the nation related to workers’ rights, police brutality and incarceration, immigrants’ rights, environmental justice, indigenous sovereignty, and LGBT issues—and more broadly railing against a Trump agenda. Read more  

A federal judge is letting an Alabama school district return to segregation.  The community of  Gardendale’s motives “assail the dignity of black schoolchildren,” but a federal judge is allowing it anyway. Read more

George Takei: Internment, America’s Great Mistake. ” I remember every school morning reciting the Pledge of Allegiance, my eyes upon the stars and stripes of the flag, but at the same time I could see from the window the barbed wire and the sentry towers where guards kept guns trained on us.”  Read more   

Ben Carson Is Proving to Be the Bizarre and Incompetent Secretary of Housing and Urban Development We Expected Him to Be. Carson has praised initiatives only to find out that Donald Trump’s budget blueprint would eliminate the programs that funded those very projects.  Read more  

Why Trump Gets a Populist Pass. The president’s racial demagoguery makes it easier for the GOP to sell tax giveaways to the wealthy. Read more  

Why I don’t write about anti-white hate crimes like the Fresno murders. But I will — as soon as fearful white critics show the same concern for black and brown folks killed in America. Read more

Black People Are Not All ‘Living in Hell.’ Contrary to Donald Trump’s indiscriminate portrayal of African-Americans as “living in hell,” the black upper middle class is ascending the economic ladder at a faster rate than its white counterpart. Read more 

Anthony Joshua stops Wladimir Klitschko in 11th round of their epic Wembley battle, adding the WBA title to his collection of heavyweight world titles. Watch the fight in pictures. 

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