Race

Thursday

David Sypher Jr.

Joe Biden recalls ‘colored kids’ to be hero of their struggle

In his first public remarks since leaving office, Joe Biden recalled – without a hint of self-awareness – the moment from his childhood he first saw “colored kids” on a bus going by.” It was, in his telling, a pivotal experience, one that sparked his youthful sense of outrage growing up in Scranton, Pennsylvania.Let’s stop right there.At best, the speech – billed as his first major intervention since Donald Trump took office – reveals how deeply stuck in the past Biden’s racial worldview really is. At worst, it’s an embarrassing reminder that the Democratic Party continues to view black voters, especially black men, not as equals or thinkers, but as props in white liberal moral storytelling.As a black conservative, I've heard this record before.

colored kids

Thursday

Robert Tombs

If ‘wokeness’ is over, can someone tell the Fitzwilliam Museum?

From our UK edition

Optimists believe that the tide of ‘wokeness’ is now ebbing. If so, the message has not yet reached Cambridge, whose wonderful university museum has its classical façade covered in sententious phrases in neon, and which has recently opened a new exhibition in agit-prop style: Rise Up: Resistance, Revolution, Abolition. Such activism is fully in step with the Museums Association, the curators’ club that instructs its members to turn their institutions into activist cells. If all this makes its founding benefactor Viscount Fitzwilliam turn in his grave, all the better: he is stigmatised as a profiteer from the slave trade, even before one reaches the cloakroom.

Wednesday

Amber Duke

Caitlin Clark kneels to ‘woke’ WNBA

WNBA star Caitlin Clark has thrown out practically all of the goodwill she earned among new women’s basketball fans and conservatives who otherwise defended her as she was subjected to blatant racism after joining the league. Clark became a lightning rod in her rookie season as her black opponents flagrantly fouled her on multiple occasions and refused to give her flowers for growing the game after a stellar college career at the University of Iowa. Clark was chosen as TIME’s Athlete of the Year last week, a well-deserved recognition of her impact on her sport and the massive celebrity she gained in such a short amount of time.

caitlin clark
dei
Pamela Paresky and Lee Jussim

A reckoning with DEI pedagogy

Diversity, Equity and Inclusion bureaucracies and programs have become ubiquitous in the corporate and educational sectors. More than half of American employees have DEI meetings or training events at work, at a cost of an estimated $8 billion annually. These initiatives are championed as tools to reduce bias and discrimination, build inclusive and empathetic environments — and redress systemic racism,  Yet the effectiveness of such trainings has rarely been rigorously and systematically evaluated. When studies have been undertaken, not only are results mixed at best, the prevailing focus has been on potential benefits, with notable exceptions: some programs have been found to reduce organizational diversity and others to produce resentment.

Thursday

Ben Domenech

Ta-Nehisi Coates, the DEIty

A decade ago, in June 2014, the Atlantic published a cover story with a simple declarative title: “The Case for Reparations,” by Ta-Nehisi Coates. The piece had taken him two years to write, and the work paid off — with praise sweeping through the ranks of media, prizes from the most prominent elite institutions. The piece was named the “Top Work of Journalism of the Decade” by New York University’s journalism institute. It was hailed as a rare piece of writing which pushed open a cultural dialogue about a controversial subject.

Coates

Thursday

Douglas Murray

The problem with Dawn Butler

From our UK edition

We hear a lot about white supremacy these days. But for some reason we rarely hear about black supremacy. I wonder why? There’s a lot more of it around. For Butler, describing someone as white or as trying to be white is clearly a great insult While it is vanishingly difficult to find an overt white supremacist in British public life, it is extremely easy to identify their black counterparts. As exhibit A I would present the Labour MP Dawn Butler. I have written about her once before, in 2020, when Ms Butler was in a car that was stopped by police. At the time I speculated that the coppers may have pulled the vehicle over in the hope of reclaiming the whirlpool bath that Butler had treated herself to at taxpayers’ expense a few years before. But it was not to be.

Thursday

Cockburn

DC bar Political Pattie’s gets hazed for being bipartisan

A new DC bar dedicated to crossing partisan lines, “Political Pattie’s,” has taken the “political” out of its name... though Cockburn will note the removal is “temporary.” Owners Drew Benbow and Sydney Bradford dropped an Instagram post on Tuesday about their name and logo change, as the “representation of the red elephant was hurtful to the community.”  “Political Pattie’s aims to be a fun, inclusive space that pokes fun at politics, not the pain politics often causes,” the post read. The disclaimer and apology (or more accurately, apologia) came after “mean-spirited online backlash.” But here’s the tea: Benbow and Bradford bought out “the Dirty Goose,” an LGBTQ bar.

Political Pattie’s

Thursday

Ella Johnson

Trump’s digs at Kamala’s racial identity could prove damaging

While Donald Trump’s outlandish behavior usually garners free publicity for him in the news, this time, there is a lot on the line. Trump’s Wednesday comments at the National Association for Black Journalists convention have been branded “audacious lie[s],” “outrageous insults,” “overtly racist,” “repulsive” and “insulting.” “She was always of Indian heritage and she was only promoting Indian heritage,” Trump said, in one of the more widely circulated quotes. “I didn’t know she was black until a number of years ago until she happened to turn black, and now she wants to be known as black.” Race is the last thing GOP political strategists want Trump to mention when it comes to Kamala’s campaign.

donald trump racial
Lloyd Evans

Reinforces the caricatures it sets out to diminish: Slave Play, at the Noël Coward Theatre, reviewed

From our UK edition

Slave Play is a series of hoaxes. The producers announced that ‘Black Out’ performances would be reserved for ‘black-identifying’ playgoers but the ticketing system is colour-blind and these so-called ‘segregated’ shows were attended by audiences of all ethnicities. The PR gambit generated lots of free publicity, but these stunts don’t always translate into ticket sales. The second hour involves screeds of impenetrable psychobabble as the couples bicker and moan The show appears to be a drama set in the Deep South before the American civil war. It opens with a white farmer humiliating his black cleaner, who easily outsmarts him. When he forces her to eat fruit from the dirty floor she tells him how delicious it tastes.

Wednesday

Cockburn

Politico reporter falsely accuses Fox anchor of saying ‘colored’

Considering the demographics who typically watch Fox News, it's ironic that it's one of its youngest viewers that's desperately in need of a hearing test. In a clip from this morning's Fox and Friends that has circulated the web, Fox host Brian Kilmeade critiqued Vice President Kamala Harris's decision to speak to a "college sorority"... but the mob has been quick to assert he said "colored sorority." Politico reporter Eugene Daniels, the current head of the White Houser Correspondents' Association, tweeted the clip with the caption: “Kilmeade: ‘She’d rather address, in the summer, a sorority…a COLORED sorority, like she can’t get outta that!’ Not this in the year of Beyonce 2024.

colored

Thursday

Charles Lipson

The Democrats caught between the dog and the hydrant 

The Democrats are not just caught between one dog and one hydrant. They are caught between three — and the water is coming down hard on their legs.  The first dog, obviously, is the president’s physical and mental condition and his status as the presumptive nominee who won near-unanimous support in the primaries and secured enough votes to win the nomination on the first ballot. Those victories leave Biden alone in charge of staying in the race. Others can pressure him, offer him carrots and sticks, but Biden and his family control the decision.  The second dog is Biden’s nearly impossible battle to recover public trust after his disastrous debate against Donald Trump. Voters simply don’t buy the White House explanation that it was “one bad night.

democrats hydrant dog

Monday

Parker Bauer

The American Ornithological Society’s war on the past

Say you’re easing along a meadow stream, upslope but not steep, somewhere in the Rockies. It’s a morning in spring, the mountains ahead still mostly snowy against a blue sky. A bird sings, giving itself away in a clump of alder. New to birding, you’re naive but full of hope, and through the binoculars you find a thing with feathers, small and olive with yellow breast and black cap. A Wilson’s warbler, says the field guide with its nifty pictures, and you feel the satisfaction of putting a name to a part of the profusion of nature. You’re out there — need it be said? — for the peace, and the bird, deftly identified, is a totem of tranquility.

ornithological

Thursday

Cockburn

Did Donald Trump say the N-word?

Just like clockwork, the allegations of racism are rolling in days after Donald Trump’s historic rally in the South Bronx. The latest hit piece in Slate, courtesy of ex-Apprentice producer Bill Pruitt, has declared that Trump bandied about the n-word with reckless abandon while shooting the hit TV show.  Pruitt, who worked as a producer on the first two seasons of The Apprentice, alleged that Trump casually dropped the slur and suggested that America wasn’t ready for a Black contestant to win the show back in 2004. Pruitt says the moment “still haunts” him to this day.  The scene was set in The Apprentice’s dim boardroom as the production team deliberated who would win the season finale — Kwame Jackson, a Black stockbroker, or Bill Rancic, a Chicago entrepreneur.

donald trump n-word

Thursday

Lloyd Evans

Cheesy remake of Our Mutual Friend: London Tide, at the Lyttelton Theatre, reviewed

From our UK edition

Our Mutual Friend has been turned into a musical with a new title, London Tide, which sounds duller and more forgettable than the original. Why change the name? To confuse fans of Dickens, presumably, and to keep the theatre half-empty while heaps of tickets are sold at a discount. At the end of Act One, an actor explains the entire plot. This might have been delivered earlier The plot is a cheesy Victorian whodunnit involving three main characters and multiple locations so it’s hard to follow the action as it flits from this lowly hovel to that seedy tavern. The chief personalities are a pretentious lawyer, a psychotic teacher and a shifty lodger who won’t reveal his name.

Thursday

Adrian Nguyen

Coleman Hughes’s case for a colorblind future

Claudine Gay would have you believe that her resignation as president of Harvard University was because of her identity. The scandal, in her and her allies’ eyes, was that — as she wrote in a New York Times op-ed — she was “a Black woman selected to lead a storied institution.” Never mind that her allies wouldn’t say the same if black academics they don’t like, like Thomas Sowell or John McWhorter, were involved in a similar scandal; their lens is always a racial one. But the colorblind response would throw all this aside.

hughes

Thursday

Laura Gascoigne

I was dreading this show – how wrong could I be: Entangled Pasts, at the Royal Academy, reviewed

From our UK edition

In the wake of the Fitzwilliam Museum’s exhibition Black Atlantic about its founder’s ties to the slave trade comes the Royal Academy’s Entangled Pasts, less of a mea culpa than an examination of conscience by an institution which, although hailed by its first president Sir Joshua Reynolds as an ‘ornament’ of Empire, was innocent of direct links to slavery.

Tuesday

Charles Lipson

Lloyd Austin’s mistake should be career-ending

The disappearance of defense secretary Lloyd Austin for a few days without notifying the White House, or even the second in command at the Pentagon, is more than a one- or two-day story.  It’s a much larger problem. It’s a problem politically for the White House, an opportunity for Republicans, a dilemma for congressional Democrats and a problem for the most powerful military in the world. And, of course, it’s a major problem for Secretary Austin’s future in the position. Let’s start with the problem for the military. It is absolutely essential that the military have a clear chain of command that is clearly specified and operational at all times. Within the military, that chain of command goes up to the senior-most officer in each service branch.

lloyd austin

Monday

David Christopher Kaufman

Being curious about race does not make you racist

When you exist in a mixed-race family like I do — black dad, white Jewish mom, Asian uncle, Latino ex-husband — race is something that’s hard to escape. We talk about our similarities, explore our differences and consider how the experiences of one generation might be similar or different for the next. Race is somehow always on our tongues. But that doesn’t necessarily make my family racist. Nor does it make the royal family racist either.  Back in March 2021 during Oprah Winfrey’s sit-down with the Duke and Duchess of Sussex, I was horrified by their now infamous exchange over the alleged concern by unnamed Windsors about the skin color of the Sussexes’ first kid. We all know what supposedly went down.

race

Monday

Charles Lipson

Daniel Cameron and the cost of racial mudslinging

Racial slurs are being hurled at Daniel Cameron, the Republican candidate for Kentucky governor. That’s despicable. It doesn’t matter what race the victim is or what race his accuser. Those slurs should be called out loudly and promptly.  They would be despicable if a black candidate faced them from a white opponent, or vice versa. They are no less despicable when a black candidate, like Cameron, faces them from other blacks. The epithet in this case is “Uncle Tom” and it has been leveled against him in paid advertisements. His crime: he’s conservative.  Those ads are the work of Black Voters Matter Action PAC. They feature the loathsome slogan, “All skinfolk ain’t kinfolk.

daniel cameron race uncle tom

Friday

Chilton Williamson, Jr.

The liberal idea of sin

The Western world, once so firmly grounded in Christianity and its Gospels, dogma and teachings, retains in the twenty-first century virtually nothing of them, the almost sole exception being the notion of sin and thus of guilt — not the Christian concept of them, but rather the modern liberal one. To begin with, the liberal idea of sin is collective; it is also highly selective, being limited to the West in general and the Caucasian race in particular. And it is obsessive, as much so as was the Christian version among the Calvinists of Geneva, or the neurotic anticommunism prevalent among the more single-minded and hysterical outliers on the American right during the 1940s and 1950s.

sin