Tag: Black Americans
Public Outrage Hasn’t Improved Policing
This is an edition of Up for Debate, a newsletter by Conor Friedersdorf. On Wednesdays, he rounds up timely conversations and solicits reader responses to one thought-provoking question. Later, he publishes some thoughtful replies. Sign up for the newsletter here.
Question of the Week
What is the best way forward for Americans who want to improve policing and the criminal-justice system?
Send your responses to [email protected] or simply reply to this email.
Conversations of Note
Earlier this month, a Black
Radio Atlantic: For Love of the Game
Part of the appeal of the World Cup is watching countries’ finest soccer players represent their nations. For many fans, though, it doesn’t have to just be root-root-root for the home team. The Atlantic staff writer Clint Smith will be cheering for the U.S., but he will also have his eye on Senegal.
Smith’s attachment to the game is personal, stretching back to when he first started soccer playing as a little boy. In this episode of Radio Atlantic,
How America Has Changed Since the First Affirmative-Action Case
This is an edition of Up for Debate, a newsletter by Conor Friedersdorf. On Wednesdays, he rounds up timely conversations and solicits reader responses to one thought-provoking question. Later, he publishes some thoughtful replies. Sign up for the newsletter here.
Question of the Week
If you were in charge of the admissions office at a top-50 college or university, how would you decide which applicants got accepted as undergraduates and which got rejected? (How would you weight grades? Test scores?
10 Reader Views on the Varieties of Anti-racism
This is an edition of Up for Debate, a newsletter by Conor Friedersdorf. On Wednesdays, he rounds up timely conversations and solicits reader responses to one thought-provoking question. Later, he publishes some thoughtful replies. Sign up for the newsletter here.
Last week I wrote, “A child born today will turn 18 in 2040. What attitudes and actions toward race and ethnicity would we adopt today if we had the best interests of that rising generation in mind?”
Bekke writes, “We … Read more
Why Putin Made Peace With the Soviets’ Archenemies
It is impossible to watch Vladimir Putin’s arrogant invasion of Ukraine without being appalled by its savagery. Dead men and women strewn on the streets of Bucha, hands bound behind their backs. Russian soldiers raping women, sometimes in front of husbands or children. Russians seizing loot of every size, from cellphones to giant John Deere wheat-harvesting combines. And, again and again, testimony about torture: beatings, electric shocks, near suffocation with plastic bags.
Buffalo Shows the Double Terror of Being Black
I loved strawberry shortcake as a child in New York City. The sliced strawberries, the juice, the softest of cake, that whipped cream. I loved it all individually. And together? Pure bliss.
Celestine Chaney loved strawberry shortcake too. A 65-year-old mother and grandmother of six, Chaney took strawberry-shortcake making to another level. She’d buy “those little cake cups,” her son, Wayne Jones, told The Buffalo News. “You cut the strawberries up, sprinkle sugar over them, and leave in the
Who Really Benefits From Student-Loan Forgiveness?
In March 2020, the government stopped bugging me—and 40 million other Americans—for student-loan payments. It also stopped collecting interest on outstanding debt. And with so many other things to worry about, I largely stopped thinking about that debt. Some survey data indicate that many of my peers became similarly disengaged. Two years later, one estimate from the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget suggests that $5,500 per borrower has been effectively canceled, largely because of the lack of interest that
‘Bel-Air’ and the Flawed Logic of ‘Black Excellence’
A pair of massive double doors swing open, and a teenage Will Smith (played by Jabari Banks) walks into his aunt and uncle’s palatial Bel-Air home, where a big-dollar cocktail-party fundraiser is taking place. The soulful hip-hop song “A Lot,” by 21 Savage, soundtracks the scene. “How much money you got? (A lot),” the lyrics recite, seemingly narrating Will’s awe as he clocks the material evidence of the Banks-family fortune. “Yo! I got some rich-ass relatives,” he says. This scene
How Should America Confront Its History of Lynchings?
Under a large white tent on a warm Sunday in early autumn, a group of residents in Montgomery County, Maryland, gathered at Welsh Park in the town of Rockville. A crescendo of gospel hymns hung above the crowd before falling gently over us like a warm bedsheet. A small group of children squealed from a playground in the distance. We were there to remember the lives of two Black men who had been lynched in the county more than
Why Democrats Can’t Win the Culture Wars
Maybe Bill Clinton got a few things right after all.
For years, Democrats have rarely cited Clinton and the centrist New Democrat movement he led through the ’90s except to renounce his “third way” approach to welfare, crime, and other issues as a violation of the party’s principles. Hillary Clinton, Joe Biden, and even Bill Clinton himself have distanced themselves from key components of his record as president.
But now a loose constellation of internal party critics is reprising