By Julianne Malveaux — Mary Turner was lynched on May 19. 1918 because she dared raise her voice. Her husband, Hayes Turner, was among 13 people lynched in two weeks in and around Valdosta, Georgia. The lynchings took place because one brutal white man, who was known to abuse workers so severely that he was only able to attract workers by getting them through the convict labor system, beat the…
Free people of color challenged racial citizenship from the start. By Ariela Gross and Alejandro de la Fuente, Washington Post — The country has spent days debating whether President Trump’s tweets telling four congresswomen of color to “go back” to their countries are racist. Although all four are U.S. citizens and three were born here, Trump’s tweets channeled a long American tradition of equating citizenship with whiteness. But at this…
His racist idea of citizenship is an old one, brought back from the margins of American politics. By Jamelle Bouie, The New York Times — If Donald Trump has a theory of anything, it is a theory of American citizenship. It’s simple. If you are white, then regardless of origin, you have a legitimate claim to American citizenship and everything that comes with it. If you are not, then you…
By Carol Anderson, Time — When in a recent tweetstorm Donald Trump suggested that four Congresswomen of color leave the U.S. and “go back” to the “totally broken and crime infested places from which they came,” social media exploded. Outrage. Even some news outlets finally let go of the euphemisms and called the tweets “racist.” The Republicans, on the other hand, were quiet. As well they would be. The ideological demographics of…
The Trump Show isn’t exactly popular, but it does mask a plutocratic agenda that’s even less palatable. By Matthew Yglesias, Vox — On Wednesday evening, President Donald Trump traveled to North Carolina to arouse the faithful by reiterating his racist crusade of the moment — a campaign to drive Rep. Ilhan Omar out of the country and back to Somalia, a country she left when she was 6 years old.…
By Chauncey DeVega, Salon — Today’s Republican Party is the largest, most powerful and most dangerous white racist organization in the United States — if not the world. Donald Trump, the president of the United States, is its leader. These are plain if not understated facts. No embellishment is needed. The examples are many. Over the last few days Donald Trump has repeatedly dug into his bucket of racist political scatology, saying…
By Michael Gerson, The Washington Post — The national debate on race — which the president has made more angry and urgent with his racial demagoguery — is hindered by imprecise language. Most whites do not feel personally guilty for the United States’ long history of imposed white supremacy. A white man who has lost his job at the coal mine, or the daughter of a recent Ukrainian immigrant, probably…
How the Nazi persecution of Jews shaped the African-American freedom struggle. By Clive Webb, History Today — Martin Luther King delivered his celebrated ‘I Have a Dream’ speech on 28 August 1963 at the March on Washington. Less well known is that one of the other speakers that day was Rabbi Joachim Prinz, a political émigré who had fled Nazi Germany in the 1930s. His presence at the march demonstrated…
We can embrace the underlying spirit of the Declaration of Independence but also learn from its shortcomings. By Matthew Rozsa, Salon — It is painful to write about the shortcomings…
Talking to the people in Youngstown, Ohio, that the national media usually ignores. By Henry Graber, The Slate — YOUNGSTOWN, Ohio—In 1984, Lewis Macklin stood up at a community meeting and argued that city officials should shut down his high school. It had been seven years since Black Monday—when Youngstown Sheet & Tube announced it was closing its largest factory, costing 5,000 people their jobs and setting off a chain of plant…
There is no doubt that concentration camps are in operation on US soil once again. By Brett Wilkins — Concentration camp (noun): a place in which large numbers of people, especially political prisoners or members of persecuted minorities, are deliberately imprisoned in a relatively small area with inadequate facilities, sometimes to provide forced labor or to await mass execution. – Oxford English Dictionary Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) has ignited a…
By Dr. Julianne Malveaux — I was honored to have been asked to provide testimony at the House Judiciary Committee hearings on H.R. 40, the legislation that would establish a commission to study reparations and recommend remedies to Congress. It is relevant legislation that has been a long time coming. It is important to note that the bill does not “cash the check,” as Dr. Martin Luther King challenged when…