Senior Fellow,
@NewAmerica
. Author of The State Must Provide. Writing a book about southern politics. Contributing writer,
@TheAtlantic
| harrisa
@newamerica
.org
My book, THE STATE MUST PROVIDE, is out today. I’ve been hard at work on this for the last few years, and I’m so excited to finally be able share it with you all.
Elizabeth Warren's higher education plan: Cancel student debt, make public college free, and create a fund of at least $50 billion for HBCUs and minority-serving institutions.
My latest:
A 15-year-old black girl did not do her remote schoolwork _in a pandemic_ and a judge ruled she violated probation, called her a “threat to (the) community,” and sent her to juvenile detention
McConnell ally says Senate won't take up House
#coronavirus
bill until after recess. “The Senate will act when we come back and we have a clearer idea of what extra steps we need to take,” Sen. Lamar Alexander told reporters.
"it lists her injuries as 'none,' even though she was shot at least eight times"
Louisville police release the Breonna Taylor incident report. It's virtually blank
HuffPost searched mentions in U.S. publications for 2019, finding that news outlets cited Buttigieg’s Rhodes scholarship 596 times.
Cory Booker, also a Rhodes scholar, had just 79 mentions.
This was a difficult story to write. My latest on Thea Hunter, a promising, brilliant scholar (and truly remarkable writer) and what academia is doing to scholars like her.
Two HBCUs--Hampton University in Virginia and Xavier University of Louisiana--announced this afternoon that they've each received the largest donations in their schools' history
my daughter started sniffling and breathing weird yesterday and we got a little nervous until we realized she had just stuffed a not insignificant amount of rice in her nose.
"When people speculated that Cummings should run for Senate in 2015, he would remind them that he was approaching the average life span for black men in America, which was 69."
Rep. Cummings would have been 69 today.
Report: Tennessee shorted historically Black college Tennessee State University by $150M to $544M in land grant funds over more than 100 years, according to a state report released Monday. Story by
@StockardSam
via
@tnlookout
Three University of Mississippi students have been suspended from their fraternity house and face possible investigation by the Department of Justice after posing with guns in front of a bullet-riddled sign honoring Emmett Till
my toddler has taken to saying "of course" instead of "yes" and it makes it seem like she's really listening to me until she does the complete opposite of what I've said.
Police gassed a young child in Huntsville, Alabama last night dispersing what they, themselves, described as a "pretty peaceful protest." That's about all I've been able to think about today.
held my *actual book*—like, the hardback ones—for the first time this morning and if you hear sobbing in the distance that’s me happy crying. in stores August 10!
In the course of clearing the streets and restoring order at Lake Street and Snelling Avenue, four people were arrested by State Patrol troopers, including three members of a CNN crew. The three were released once they were confirmed to be members of the media.
“During the Civil War, the Confederate Army never reached the Capitol... Two days ago, a man walked through the halls of gov’t bearing the flag of a group of people who had seceded from the United States and gone to war against it.”
@ClintSmithIII
Stacey Abrams— Spelman
Andrew Gillum — Florida A&M
Mandela Barnes — Alabama A&M
My latest on the unprecedented year for HBCU alums running for statewide office:
America doesn't need to diagnose the problem again. The nation has studied its racism on a loop for decades. It knows exactly what it needs to fix.
My latest:
A Wichita man has been arrested on suspicion of threatening to kidnap and kill Wichita Mayor Brandon Whipple over frustrations with city’s mask ordinance
Since 1987, North Carolina has underfunded its land-grant HBCU, NC A&T, by at least $2.75 billion (inflation-adjusted), according to a new report from Forbes.
It's not the only one.
“Today, states reported that 61,964 people were hospitalized with COVID-19, more than at any other time in the pandemic. For context, there are now 40 percent more people hospitalized with COVID-19 than there were two weeks ago.”
Administrators preemptively canceling classes because they’re unsure if they run afoul of a law regulating speech is the exact chilling effect people warned would happen
He resigned as the president of the College Republicans at Washington State after he was spotted at a white nationalist rally in Charlottesville.
He was just re-elected to lead the chapter:
Black folks have often had to teach each other the history left out of textbooks; the stories America would prefer to forget about—the ones that make things the way they are.
My Granddaddy would have turned 90 this week. Here's what he taught me:
my daughter's teacher just asked her class if they knew what day it was during the morning video call and one of the kids said, "nope!" very matter-of-factly, and honestly same.
.
@GrahamDavidA
, Jan. 7:
“Remember what yesterday’s attempted coup at the U.S. Capitol was like. Very soon, someone might try to convince you that it was different. Maybe someone already has.”
The recent profusion of Black mayors in the South is striking when you consider that, not long ago, there weren't any.
Here's my story from the October issue of
@TheAtlantic
on the Black mayors charting a path towards a new South:
John Dingell: "My advice always begins with the truth, which is why would-be despots and demagogues try so hard to discredit it. They hate it like the devil hates holy water."
"If Joe Biden spends too much more time in South Carolina... we’re going to give him a South Carolina driver’s license and start making him pay South Carolina taxes.”
It paid off.
My story on Biden's win from Columbia, SC:
John Lewis believed in the American project, and spent his whole life trying to perfect it.
I spoke with
@SenBooker
,
@Sifill_LDF
,
@RevDrBarber
, and
@harrisonjaime
about the world he helped create and the work that lies ahead.
This is exciting: Prairie View A&M is launching a Toni Morrison Writer's Program, which will an annual Writer-in-Residence, using money from MacKenzie Scott's $50 mill donation. (Scott was Morrison's student at Princeton.)
"The trauma is repetitive. We weep. But we are still, even in our most anguished seasons, not reducible to the fact of our grief."
Reading
@imaniperry
on the liberating joy of blackness is exactly what I needed this morning:
First day of snow:
YAY SNOW!
Third day of snow:
Dearest Eudora—
I grow weary with each passing moment; the pillowy white piles thick outside my window as I fear the winter may never abate...
"They would hoist extra-heavy items alone to avoid wasting time getting help. They had to, they said, or they would lose their jobs. So they took the risk.
Then, if they got hurt, they would lose their jobs anyway."
So excited to share the cover of my forthcoming book, The State Must Provide, which is now available for pre-order on Bookshop, Amazon, or wherever you like to buy books!
Amazon:
Bookshop:
Everywhere else:
about a year ago, i set a pandemic goal: learn how to juggle. (like, actually juggle, with fruit and balls and stuff.) and i'm proud to report that the mission has been accomplished, much to the delight of my daughters.
Candidates have made a lot of talking about support for HBCUs this election cycle; but she's actually attaching what the schools have asked for: money.
Kagan, in dissent on student loan case: "The result here is that the Court substitutes itself for Congress and the Executive Branch in making national policy about student-loan forgiveness."
I've been thinking a lot about tuition- and debt-free college lately, so I went to Berea College in Kentucky where they've been doing it for more than a century. Here's how:
"The willingness of officers to behave this way on camera and then lie about it raises discomfiting questions about what such officers are willing to do, or mislead the public about, when no one is recording."
Read
@AdamSerwer
:
"These behaviors that we see and that we sometimes pathologize are not rooted in Blackness or the Black experience," Gaylord-Harden told me. "They’re rooted in traumatic stress.”
My latest:
In the post-Brown years, several states used standardized test scores to limit the number of black students at predominantly white universities. Here's some hard proof from Texas: