racism 
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SOURCE: New York Times
1/23/2021
Biden Seeks to Define His Presidency by an Early Emphasis on Equity
Nicole Hemmer argues that Joe Biden appears more willing to pledge action on racial equity than Barack Obama was; it remains to be seen if Biden can avoid a backlash from conservatives.
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SOURCE: The Atlantic
1/25/2021
What Hank Aaron Told Me
The author received a touching reply to a fan letter he wrote Hank Aaron in 1972. Writing a book about Aaron years later, he realized he didn't know the half of the burdens Aaron carried in pursuit of baseball immortality.
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SOURCE: Made By History at the Washington Post
1/22/2021
White Americans have Weaponized the Idea of Girlhood
by Crystal Webster
The concept of childhood has elastic boundaries; in a racist society, those boundaries stretch to portray whites as innocents deserving protection and Black youth as dangerous and susceptible to punishment.
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1/24/2021
Misremember the Alamo
by Douglas Sackman
Like most Americans, when Trump tries to "remember the Alamo," he gets it all wrong. His recent visit to Alamo, Texas was 240 miles south of the mission so holy to many Texans, but it was closer in spirit than Trump probably realized.
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SOURCE: ESPN
1/22/2021
Hank Aaron's Lasting Impact is Measured in More than Home Runs
by Howard Bryant
Hank Aaron biographer Howard Bryant shared common experiences with the baseball legend as a Black man in the sports industry. He writes about the legacy of the slugger who lived through the Jim Crow and civil rights eras and died at age 86 today.
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SOURCE: Public Books
1/18/2021
When Black Humanity is Denied
by Edna Bonhomme
Enlightenment institutions – the prison, science, and asylums – are organized through binaries that draw boundaries between people who are and are not able to exercise freedom. Black artistic work supports Black freedom by challenging those boundaries.
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SOURCE: Public Books
1/20/2021
Solidarity is a Process: Talking with Kelly Lytle Hernandez, Josh Kun, and Destin Jenkins
A panel of scholars discusses the concept of cross-racial solidarity and the prospects of creating powerful coalitions of the disempowered.
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SOURCE: New York Times
1/21/2021
Charlottesville Inspired Biden to Run. Now It Has a Message for Him
People who lived through the 2017 white supremacist invasion of Charlottesville warn that there can't be any unity without accountability.
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SOURCE: MSNBC
1/20/2021
The Trump Administration's Thinly-Veiled Rebuke of 'The 1619 Project' is a Sloppy, Racist Mess
by Kevin M. Kruse
The Commission report selectively quotes from Martin Luther King and ignores massive white resistance to paint a picture of the Civil Rights movement as a national consensus, in order to bash contemporary demands for racial justice.
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SOURCE: Bloomberg CityLab
1/18/2021
The Next New Deal Must Be for Black Americans, Too
by Willow Lung-Amam
Those advocating for New Deal-type programs from the Biden-Harris administration must be profoundly aware of the way the first New Deal accommodated racial prejudice and deepened material inequality; any acceptable understanding of "build back better" must actively tackle racial inequality as well as protecting the existing middle class.
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SOURCE: Made By History at the Washington Post
1/10/2021
The Attempted Insurrection was Only Part of the Right’s Anti-Democratic Playbook
by Melissa DeVelvis and DJ Polite
The overthrow of Reconstruction in South Carolina involved a symbiotic relationship between white political leaders and a loose coalition of armed white vigilante groups.
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1/17/2020
Confronting "Who We Are"
by Verena Erlenbusch-Anderson
The Capitol riots should prompt consideration of how racism is sustained by mainstream institutions and operates through everyday patterns of thought and action, as much as in open eruptions of violence.
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1/17/2020
Restoring Civil Society by Executive Order?: An Inaugural Reverie
by John L. Godwin
Joe Biden should defend the First Amendment right to peaceable assembly by a temporary emergency order criminalizing the carrying of firearms at public protest events and make clear that the threat of force is not part of the democratic process.
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1/14/2020
Historians, Insurrectionists and Fragile White Folks
by James Brewer Stewart
A historian of abolition and an advocate of racial justice argues that historians must reject the psychological framework of some recent popular antiracist books and learn from the history of activists embodying Frederick Douglass's call for a "moral revolution" through engagement with others.
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SOURCE: Bloomberg CityLab
1/14/2021
How Fear Took Over the American Suburbs
Historian Kyle Riismandel's new book “Neighborhood of Fear” examines the cultivation of a white suburban culture of vigilantism and the political exploitation of fear of community change in the late 20th century.
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SOURCE: Dissent
1/10/2021
Disenfranchisement: An American Tradition
by Julilly Kohler-Hausmann
Invoking the specter of voter fraud to undermine democratic participation is a tactic as old as the United States itself.
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SOURCE: The Atlantic
1/11/2021
Denial Is the Heartbeat of America
by Ibram X. Kendi
Claims that the Capitol riots were "not who we are" are rooted in denial of the long history of racist and antidemocratic politics in the United States.
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1/10/2021
Historical Rhetoric Resurfaced in Georgia's Runoff Election
by Alicia K. Jackson
Jon Ossoff and Raphael Warnock didn't just defeat their Republican opponents on January 5, they defeated a number of racist tropes that have characterized Georgia politics since Reconstruction.
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1/10/2021
Images of the Capitol Riot Reflect a National Crisis
by Danielle Taana Smith
Treating Trumpism as an aberration rather than as the eruption of deep-seated impulses to bigotry and violence is a dangerous delusion.
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SOURCE: The Nation
1/8/2020
The Capitol Riot Reveals the Dangers From the Enemy Within
by Eric Foner
Let’s not assume that until the Capitol riot the United States was a well-functioning democracy.
News
- Washington History Seminar TODAY: Claudio Saunt's "Unworthy Republic"
- The Bonnie and Richard Reiss Graduate Institute for Constitutional History Seminar Spring 2021 Session (Virtual)
- Hank Aaron's Lasting Impact is Measured in More than Home Runs
- Hank Aaron's 715th, Called by Vin Scully
- Washington Must Treat White Supremacist Terrorism as a Transnational Threat