Latest news with #racialreckoning
New York Times
3 days ago
- Politics
- New York Times
Trump's Perversion of Justice Has Reached a New Phase
President Trump's Justice Department is turning civil rights enforcement upside down. Last week, Harmeet Dhillon, the assistant attorney general for civil rights, asked a federal judge to sentence a former Louisville police officer named Brett Hankison to one day in prison. Last year, a Kentucky jury convicted Hankison of violating Breonna Taylor's civil rights when he fired multiple rounds from his handgun into her apartment on the night the police killed her. The Taylor case was one of a series of dreadful killings of unarmed Black Americans that helped touch off America's racial reckoning in 2020. It was also a paradigmatic example of the way that flawed systems interact with reckless police conduct to create fatal injustice. In the early morning hours of March 13, 2020, police officers gathered outside Taylor's apartment door. They had obtained a no-knock search warrant based on allegations that a suspected drug dealer named Jamarcus Glover had received packages at Taylor's home. Glover and Taylor once had a relationship, but Taylor was not the target of the warrant. The police on the scene were instructed to knock, even though they had a no-knock warrant. And here's where the stories of witnesses start to diverge. Officers at the scene say they knocked and announced that they were the police. The early 911 calls indicate that neighbors didn't know the police were present. In fact, in initial statements made after the raid, not a single neighbor reported having heard the police identify themselves. One witness initially said the police did not announce themselves, but he later changed his story and claimed he heard the police identify themselves. Taylor was in the apartment with her boyfriend, a man named Kenneth Walker. He testified that they were startled by a loud pounding on the door, and he said he never heard the police announce themselves. Concerned that the pounding might be coming from an intruder, he grabbed his gun, which he owned lawfully, and approached the door. Want all of The Times? Subscribe.
Washington Post
3 days ago
- Entertainment
- Washington Post
Honorée Fanonne Jeffers's work sometimes stings, and always sings
Honorée Fanonne Jeffers was already a tenured scholar of literature and a celebrated poet when she published her debut novel, 'The Love Songs of W.E.B. Du Bois,' in 2021. It was a centuries-spanning epic of intergenerational Black Southern histories that was met with a cascade of rave reviews. The Washington Post's Ron Charles called it 'the kind of book that comes around only once a decade.' The novel arrived during a now-faded and unfinished season of racial and historical reckonings following the murder of George Floyd. Systemic injustice, long-standing monuments to white supremacy and profound inequality sparked nationwide protests and debate. The continuing backlash and counter-awakening have revealed the stubborn depths of the struggle. Now, in her first book of nonfiction, Jeffers revisits the years since 2021 through a personal lens, exploring what it means to live and heal through her experiences as a Black Southern woman, educator and artist. 'Misbehaving at the Crossroads' is a distinctive blend of memoir and criticism, a set of fearless pieces on politics, history, art and gender in the mold of her literary forebears Toni Morrison and James Baldwin. But Jeffers's book should not be confused for 'urgent' political observation in the time of Donald Trump. This is a collection forged in deeply personal pain and poetry. It's a first-person narrative about living and surviving at the intersections of self and other, Black and White, American and African, woman and men, mother and daughter. These are the crossroads at which Jeffers exists, writes and misbehaves. Though configured as an essay collection, this book functions as a great memoir, tracing an arc of unknowing beginnings, adolescent rupture, displacement, trauma — eventually arriving at a place of understanding and even catharsis. From an abusive childhood in Georgia through her literary blossoming and up to her acclaimed life in academia and publishing, Jeffers's story soars, stings and, always, sings. Music is at the heart of the project. Jeffers's background as a poet — a self-described blues poet, specifically — is in clear view across these works of mostly prose. As on any great concept album, there are short interludes, including fully italicized open letters akin to voice memos, and many deliciously melodic registers. There's rage as orchestral and ancestral chorus, the sensual softness of an R&B riff as she falls in love in Senegal, and the melancholic, sage beauty of the blues as she journeys home to Georgia to care for her dying mother. As she writes in a diary entry on her drive home to be with her mother: 'I'm thinking about this country that I love but which gives me eternal, deep disappointment. I'm thinking about the southern landscape that daily pierces me with its beauty, even while I wonder what horrors this landscape remembers.' What is most exciting about this collection is that it rarely resembles many other such books by celebrated writers. Essays are often gathered as trophy collections, bringing together discrete pieces, often previously published, with introductions that can be forced attempts to tie a unifying bow around the contents. Jeffers's collection, by contrast, does not feature a conventional introduction. It begins with a detailed family tree before leaping into Jeffers's vantage with an essay about watching the insurrection of Jan. 6, 2021, from her bedroom in Oklahoma: The book unfolds in a nonlinear way, clearly composed in the cauldron of these post-pandemic years of doomscrolling and splintered attention spans. Each of the short chapters flows into the next, building on themes addressed earlier, returning to previous questions with new attempts at answers and underscoring the book's larger ideas anew, as a song's chorus might. It is highly readable and, despite the sometimes painful material, entertaining. The cover art is from 'Links Together,' a lithograph by the artist and activist Elizabeth Catlett held by the National Gallery of Art in Washington. It is a stylish work of portraiture centering three dark-skinned women in close-up against a gold background, under a canopy of leaves, a trinity holding hands in solidarity and love. It's a beautiful image in its own right; it also captures Jeffers's mission in everything that follows. As Jeffers has said in interviews, this book is by and for Black women, designed at its core to convey their stories and celebrate, emphasize and assert their beauty, humanity and dignity. In such terms, I may not be the primary audience for 'Misbehaving at the Crossroads,' but I am deeply grateful that it invites all readers to access these most intimate human responses. The mediated effect of so much polite mainstream writing about American history, multiculturalism, sexism and racism is to offer naive bridges of understanding; earnest attempts at conversation can fail to deliver an emotional jolt and necessary truths. By eschewing such platitudes for something rooted in blunt, conversational and fearless honesty, Jeffers opens doors to those beyond her own experience. The cumulative emotional effect of this collage of short, interlocked essays, letters and poems is a term Jeffers herself used in a recent interview: big feelings. She told her interviewer that much of the injustice and violence in American life is rooted in the inability of too many in power to deal with their interior lives and unresolved emotions. Personal reckonings with trauma, inheritance and falsehoods are a necessary first step to any broader and sustainable national advancement. As Jeffers demonstrates on each page, it was through words that she found her process and her form to traverse the terrain of Black womanhood. 'Misbehaving at the Crossroads' is a brilliant testament to just how restorative the writing of one life's big feelings can be, and how equally pleasurable its reading. Bilal Qureshi is a culture writer and radio journalist. Essays & Writings By Honorée Fanonne Jeffers. Harper. 352 pp. $30
Washington Post
24-05-2025
- Politics
- Washington Post
Much of the ‘racial reckoning' efforts after Floyd's murder never emerged
It's been five years since George Floyd's murder by Minnesota police officers — nine minutes and 29 seconds captured on video and broadcast around the globe, an inflection point in America's centuries-old struggle with racism. Floyd's death ushered in what many called a 'racial reckoning.' Much of the national conversation on race curved toward police reform, health equity and the racial wealth gap.
Washington Post
09-05-2025
- Politics
- Washington Post
Columbus statue removed from a Connecticut city in 2020 finally finds a home at a new museum
NEW HAVEN, Conn. — A Christopher Columbus statue removed in 2020 amid a climate of racial reckoning after the police killing of George Floyd has finally found a home in a new museum dedicated to preserving the history of New Haven, Connecticut. Mayor Justin Elicker and other officials on Friday announced an 'art loan agreement' has been reached with the Lost in New Haven Museum, which plans to display the 1892 monument to the 15th century explorer as part of its wide-ranging collection.
