Tag: Race and Ethnicity

We’re Not Burdens on Society. We’re Engines of Economic Progress.

History is being made on the Rio Grande. Hundreds of thousands of migrants braved the journey across it last year, setting records and contributing to an urgent border crisis. As spectacle, it has been transfixing. Yet misconceptions abound. It’s as if the sight of a migrant scaling a wall or wading ashore is now a […]

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For Ytasha Womack, the Afrofuture is Now

On Feb. 17, the Adler Planetarium in Chicago unveiled a new sky show called “Niyah and the Multiverse,” a blend of theoretical cosmology, Black culture and imagination. And as with many things Afrofuturistic, Ytasha Womack’s fingerprints are all over it. Ms. Womack, who writes both about the genre and from within it, has curated Afrofuturism […]

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Latinos, Shifting Toward Trump, Land at the Center of the 2024 Campaign

Former President Donald J. Trump’s growing support among Latino voters is threatening to upend the coalition that has delivered victories to Democrats for more than a decade, putting the politically divided group at the center of a tug of war that could determine elections across the country. Polls show that Mr. Trump’s standing with Latino […]

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Art Review: Three Critics on the Whitney Biennial 2024

The Whitney Biennial, New York’s most prominent showcase of new American (or American-ish) art, thrives on argument: in print, in comment threads, in barrooms and sometimes in the galleries themselves. Its 81st edition opens Thursday to museum members and to the public on March 20, and it introduces a “dissonant chorus” — in the phrase […]

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‘Past Lives’ Changed My Mind About the Man Sitting Next to Me

My most stressful moviegoing experience last year was not the mushroom cloud in “Oppenheimer” or the murder trial scenes in “Anatomy of a Fall,” but watching the story of a love triangle among a Korean American woman, a Korean guy and a white guy in the Oscar-nominated “Past Lives.” In the film, Nora, our 30-something […]

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Max Hardy, 40, Dies; Helped Bring Chef-Driven Cuisine to Detroit

Max Hardy, who helped bring a new level of chef-driven yet accessible cuisine to his native Detroit, and who was widely considered among the most promising of a young generation of Black culinary stars, died on Monday. He was 40. His publicist, David E. Rudolph, announced the death but did not provide a cause or […]

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Duke Asks Its Crazed Basketball Fans to Heckle Responsibly

The fervent basketball fans at Duke University, hundreds of whom are camping in a tent village to get prime seats for Saturday’s rivalry game against the University of North Carolina, have been a target of diversity, equity and inclusion efforts this year. The student section of Blue Devils fans, called “Cameron Crazies” for the energy […]

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Federal Judge Rules Minority Business Agency Must Serve White People as Well

The Minority Business Development Agency, a Commerce Department agency created during the Nixon administration to help minority-owned businesses, discriminated against white people and must offer its services to people of all races and ethnic groups, a federal judge in Texas ruled on Wednesday. Judge Mark T. Pittman of the U.S. District Court for the Northern […]

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Racial Profiling in Japan Is Prevalent but Unseen, Some Residents Say

It’s not that there is anything bad about your hair, the police officer politely explained to the young Black man as commuters streamed past in Tokyo Station. It’s just that, based on his experience, people with dreadlocks were more likely to possess drugs. Alonzo Omotegawa’s video of his 2021 stop and search led to debates […]

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How D.E.I. Efforts Can Help Minorities Flourish on Campus

Like many African American professors, I teach at a predominantly white institution (Wheaton College) and live in the largely white small city where it’s located, outside Chicago. I have not experienced serious acts of discrimination, but that doesn’t make life simple. When people think about the difficulty of being Black in largely white spaces in […]

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Racial Turnout Gap Has Widened With a Weakened Voting Rights Act, Study Finds

When the Supreme Court knocked down a core part of the Voting Rights Act in 2013, Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. argued that some of the law’s protections against racial discrimination were no longer necessary. He wrote that the once-troubling turnout gap between white and Black voters in areas with histories of discrimination at […]

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The Lost Story of New York’s Most Powerful Black Woman

Elizabeth Amelia Gloucester appeared in the census for the final time on June 8, 1880. The census enumerators who crisscrossed Brooklyn Heights were no doubt surprised to find a wealthy Black woman presiding over Remsen House, the grand boarding hotel not far from Brooklyn City Hall that served the white professional classes. Ms. Gloucester was […]

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California’s Push for Ethnic Studies Runs Into the Israel-Hamas War

California has grand ambitions for ethnic studies. By 2025, the state’s public high schools — about 1,600 of them — must teach the subject. By 2030, students won’t be able to graduate high school without it. For policymakers, a goal is to give California students, 80 percent of whom are nonwhite, the opportunity to study […]

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On Capitol Hill, Republicans Use Bigoted Attacks Against Political Foes

When Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene, Republican of Georgia, stood on the House floor this month to announce her proposal to censure the only Somali-born member of Congress, she said she was seeking punishment for “Representative Ilhan Omar of Somalia — I mean Minnesota.” Earlier that same week, Representative Troy Nehls, Republican of Texas, called the […]

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Why Reparations For Slavery Are Long Overdue

In my debut novel, a family retraces their lineage in order to be eligible for the nation’s first federal reparations program for Black Americans. When I was selling my novel in 2021, it was pitched to publishers as “speculative fiction, but only slightly.” I hadn’t specifically identified that genre, but I could see how it […]

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Karine Jean-Pierre and John Kirby Share an Uncomfortable White House Spotlight

On the day she was named the first Black and first openly gay White House press secretary, Karine Jean-Pierre said she hoped her appointment might inspire other people who, like her, never imagined occupying the pre-eminent role in political communications. “I think this is important for them to see this,” she said in May 2022. […]

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B Michael, the Designer Who’s Dressed Beyoncé, Whitney Houston and More

He has had a fashion business in New York since the late 1980s, the same decade that Michael Kors and Donna Karan started their namesake lines. He was inducted into the Council of Fashion Designers of America in 1998. From 1999 to 2018, he showed two collections each year, some on the schedule at New […]

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Some Fall Out of Vogue. Gabriella Karefa-Johnson Jumped.

When Gabriella Karefa-Johnson, the fashion editor-personality who became famous as the first Black woman to style a Vogue cover (in 2021) and even more famous after she got into a social media brouhaha with Kanye West, was interviewing for her first big fashion job at Vogue, she ended up, not surprisingly, in front of Anna […]

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From Ballet to Blackjack, a Dance Pioneer’s Amazing Odyssey

Among the blaring lights and all-hours amusements of downtown Las Vegas, in a sea of slot machines at the Four Queens Hotel and Casino, George Lee sits quietly at a blackjack table, dealing cards eight hours a day, five days a week, a job he’s been doing for more than 40 years. Lee, 88, was […]

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Amid a Fraught Process, Penn Museum Entombs Remains of 19 Black People

There was very little that could be said about the 19 people who were eulogized on Saturday morning in a service at the University of Pennsylvania. Their names were lost, and not much about their lives was known beyond the barest facts: an old age spent in the poorhouse, a problem with cavities. They were […]

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Target Pulls Magnet Kit That Misidentified Three Black Leaders

Target has pulled from its stores an educational magnet collection that misidentified three Black leaders, after a high school history teacher called attention to the errors in a TikTok video. In the video, the teacher, Tierra Espy, said she bought the “Civil Rights Magnetic Learning Activity,” a tin case of 26 magnets and informational cards […]

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Supreme Court Won’t Block Use of Race in West Point Admissions for Now

The Supreme Court declined on Friday to temporarily block race-conscious admissions at the U.S. Military Academy at West Point, clearing the way for the school to continue considering race as a factor in selecting the class that will enroll in the fall. The court’s order rejected a request for emergency relief from Students for Fair […]

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The World Has Caught Up to Frantz Fanon

The shock of the new, in political life, often sends us back to the past in search of an intellectual compass. Amid the rise of Donald Trump, Viktor Orban, Jair Bolsanaro and other authoritarian leaders, Hannah Arendt’s “The Origins of Totalitarianism,” published in 1951, enjoyed a surge of attention, and Arendt herself acquired a prophet-like […]

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On the Ballot in South Carolina: Biden’s Pitch to Black Voters

The Daily is made by Rachel Quester, Lynsea Garrison, Clare Toeniskoetter, Paige Cowett, Michael Simon Johnson, Brad Fisher, Chris Wood, Jessica Cheung, Stella Tan, Alexandra Leigh Young, Lisa Chow, Eric Krupke, Marc Georges, Luke Vander Ploeg, M.J. Davis Lin, Dan Powell, Sydney Harper, Mike Benoist, Liz O. Baylen, Asthaa Chaturvedi, Rachelle Bonja, Diana Nguyen, Marion […]

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Pollution Is Driving Black Americans to the South. It May Not Be Any Better.

The air pollution in Emma Lockridge’s community in Detroit was often so bad, she had to wear a surgical mask inside her house. The smokestacks of nearby refineries and factories filled the sky outside her windows with black particles. “I couldn’t sleep because of those fumes,” she told me last year. In 2021 she fled […]

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The Home of Carter G. Woodson, the Man Behind Black History Month

The origins of Black History Month can be traced back nearly a hundred years to an unassuming, three-story brick rowhouse in Washington. In 1922, Carter G. Woodson, known as “the father of Black history,” bought the home at 1538 Ninth Street for $8,000. The home served as the headquarters for the Association for the Study […]

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The Young Black Conservative Who Grew Up With, and Rejects, D.E.I.

For many progressives, it was a big moment. In 2019, Congress was holding its first hearing on whether the United States should pay reparations for slavery. To support the idea, Democrats had invited the influential author Ta-Nehisi Coates, who had revived the reparations issue in an article in The Atlantic, and the actor and activist […]

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Hate Crimes Reported in Schools Nearly Doubled Between 2018 and 2022

The number of reported hate crimes in schools and colleges nearly doubled between 2018 and 2022, according to data released Monday by the F.B.I. About 1,300 hate crimes were reported in elementary schools, secondary schools and colleges in 2022, up from 700 in 2018 — an increase of about 90 percent, according to the report, […]

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Will a New Monument for Those Enslaved by France Heal or Divide?

As the color drained from the sky, a group gathered before the white-stoned basilica of St. Denis, where dozens of French kings are buried, to pay homage to their ancestors. Not to King Louis XIII, who formerly authorized the slave trade in 1642, or his son, the Sun King, who introduced slavery’s legal code, both […]

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In a New Cannabis Landscape, a Navy Veteran Battles for Racial Equity

“Transforming Spaces” is a series about women driving change in sometimes unexpected places. Jam the towel under the door. Open the window. And hide the bong. For decades, college students have found ways to mask the pungent aroma of marijuana smoke on campuses. Wanda James, however, did not always feel a need to hide. A […]

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Mocking Haley, Trump Adds to His Long History of Racist Attacks

Donald J. Trump first established his connection with the largely white Republican base more than a decade ago by stoking discomfort with the election of Barack Obama, the nation’s first Black president — the beginning of the so-called birther movement. In the years since, he has continued to pile up accusations of racism on the […]

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