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Clockwise from top left: Michael Drake, president of Ohio State University; Elizabeth Alexander, president of the Mellon Foundation; Cecilia Conrad, a managing director at the MacArthur Foundation; and Henry Louis Gates Jr., a professor at Harvard.Credit...

Black Scholars Are Not ‘Rare Creatures’

By Commentaries/Opinions

When Purdue’s president said this, I had to respond because this myth is so pervasive. By G. Gabrielle Starr, The New York Times — In late November, the president of Purdue University, Mitch Daniels, told students that he will soon “be recruiting one of the rarest creatures in America — a leading, I mean a really leading, African-American scholar.” “Creatures?” a student asked. “Come on.” “It’s a figure of speech. You must have taken some literature,”…

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How disinformation campaigns suppress the Black vote. Illustration by Katherine Streeter

Manipulation Machines

By Editors' Choice

How disinformation campaigns suppress the Black vote By Errin Haines, CJR — During the Democratic debates on June 27, Senator Kamala Harris had a standout moment. Former vice president Joe Biden, the…

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Jeb Bush speaks at a 2013 American Legislative Exchange Council meeting.

Rightwing ‘bill mill’ accused of sowing racist and white supremacist policies

By News & Current Affairs

By Ed Pilkington, The Guardian — Alec, the rightwing network that brings conservative lawmakers together with corporate lobbyists to create model legislation that is cloned across the US, has been accused of spreading racist and white supremacist policies targeted at minority communities. A report published on Tuesday by the Center for Constitutional Rights (CCR) and other advocacy groups charges Alec with propagating white supremacy. In one of the sharpest criticisms yet levelled at…

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