Huntington Park Police Shoot and Kill Black Double Amputee Wielding Knife (VIDEO)

The video is here.

At at the Los Angeles Times, "Video shows police fatally shooting double amputee who was holding knife," and "Video adds to questions about police shooting of a double amputee holding a knife."

When Ideology Trumps Empathy

From Heather Mac Donald, at City Journal, "Progressives profess to care deeply about inner-city black Americans, but their voting patterns suggest otherwise."

Reuben Jonathan Miller, Halfway Home

At Amazon, Reuben Jonathan Miller, Halfway Home: Race, Punishment, and the Afterlife of Mass Incarceration.

Robert Samuels and Toluse Olorunnipa, His Name Is George Floyd

At Amazon, Robert Samuels and Toluse Olorunnipa, His Name Is George Floyd: One Man's Life and the Struggle for Racial Justice. 

The Price of an Unpopular Argument

It's Glenn Loury's introduction to the video below:

Thousands of hours of new race-related content pop up every day on cable news, talk radio, podcasts, newsletters, and YouTube. If you’re tired of hearing partisan left-right talking head punditry, the digital democratization of the media has made pretty much any point of view on race in America—from the benign to the malignant—available to you, if you do a little digging.

On The Glenn Show, I often say things that I nevertheless categorize as “unsayable.” But I haven’t been booted off Twitter (at least not yet). I haven’t been fired or jailed for anything I’ve said. People have gotten mad and said disparaging things about me in public, but that’s their right. So why does it feel like there are certain things “one can’t say” about race?

Violating the progressive line on race can have less easily definable social and professional costs than a Twitter ban or the FBI knocking on your door. As John McWhorter points out in the following excerpt from our recent live event at the Comedy Store, simply stating the facts about crime and racial disparities can lead people to look askance at you or cut you off entirely, to regard you as politically untrustworthy or disreputable. To insist, as I do below, that the out-of-wedlock birthrate among black Americans is a scandal can invite the same response.

There is every reason in the world to ignore an unpopular argument...

 

WATCH: What Do We Know About Diversity? DEI's Unknown Unknowns (With John McWhorter)

Here's the discussion at Glenn Loury's Substack, "What do we know about the effects of DEI initiatives? In one sense, we know quite a lot."

And at the video, these are great guys:

James Baldwin, The Fire Next Time

Following-up, "James Baldwin on the Dick Cavett Show (VIDEO)."

A must read, at Amazon, James Baldwin, The Fire Next Time.

James Baldwin on the Dick Cavett Show (VIDEO)

From the excellent documentary film, "I Am Not Your Negro." 

Happy Juneteenth everybody!

'Afro' Hair Pick Statue to Commemorate Juneteenth Unveiled in Lafayette Square, New Orleans, Louisiana

This is just dumb.

Sorry not sorry. 

Juneteenth is this coming Sunday. 

#Juneteenth #Shaft #IsaacHayes 🎶🎶🎶 https://t.co/AgGSAelnLx

— Donald Douglas 📘 (@AmPowerBlog) June 18, 2022

Norman Podhoretz Interview at Claremont Review: 'The Rise of the Anti-Ameican Left'

At the Claremont Review of Books, "Present at Creation. Norman Podhoretz on the Rise of the Anti-American Left":

Anyway, what’s going on now with “anti-racism” is really different from the past, because it’s one of the main, or perhaps the main, weapon of attack on America. What’s happened today is that the gloves are off, the disguises are off, the leftists, black and white, talk now publicly the way they only used to talk privately, it’s out in the open and there is a tiny bit of resistance being mounted recently, but only a tiny bit so far. So, it is worse and a lot of people are now saying, “We are in a cold civil war.” And we were not in a civil war yet in those days, in the 1960s. We were so to speak in the 1840s or early 1850s, not in the 1860s. But we’re there now (except, thank God, for the guns). I don’t know how this divide is going to work itself out, but I consider it evil because I still believe, and I believe in a way more than ever, that this country is not only a force for good in itself and in the world at large, but one of the high points of human civilization...

RTWT.

Biden's Incoming Press Secretary Laughs When Asked Who Is Handling Baby Formula Crisis

From Katie Pavlich, at Townhall, "Incoming White House Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre was asked onboard Air Force One Wednesday afternoon about the ongoing baby formula shortage rattling American parents."

"The shelves are wiped out," CBS News' @CHueyBurns says on the baby formula shortage in the U.S., calling it an "urgent need for families right now."

"You're starting to see pressure applied in terms of government accountability...A lot of questions about the supply chain." pic.twitter.com/hTju1wJbLS

— CBS News (@CBSNews) May 9, 2022

Eric Foner, Gateway to Freedom

At Amazon, Eric Foner, Gateway to Freedom: The Hidden History of the Underground Railroad.

Andrea Elliott, Invisible Child

At Amazon, Andrea Elliott, Invisible Child: Poverty, Survival & Hope in an American City.

Groundbreaking Career of Sidney Poitier (VIDEO)

When I was in elementary school, my dad had me and my sisters sit down and watch 'Guess Who's Coming to Dinner." Poitier was BIG for black America. Pathbreaking figure of the 20th century.

At Deadline, "Sidney Poitier: A Groundbreaking Career In Pictures."

And at the New York Times, "Sidney Poitier, Who Paved the Way for Black Actors in Film, Dies at 94":

The first Black performer to win the Academy Award for best actor, for “Lilies of the Field,” he once said he felt “as if I were representing 15, 18 million people with every move I made.”

Sidney Poitier, whose portrayal of resolute heroes in films like “To Sir With Love,” “In the Heat of the Night” and “Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner” established him as Hollywood’s first Black matinee idol and helped open the door for Black actors in the film industry, has died at 94.

His death was confirmed by Eugene Torchon-Newry, acting director general of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs in the Bahamas, where Mr. Poitier grew up. No other details were immediately provided.

Mr. Poitier, whose Academy Award for the 1963 film “Lilies of the Field” made him the first Black performer to win in the best-actor category, rose to prominence when the civil rights movement was beginning to make headway in the United States. His roles tended to reflect the peaceful integrationist goals of the struggle.

Although often simmering with repressed anger, his characters responded to injustice with quiet determination. They met hatred with reason and forgiveness, sending a reassuring message to white audiences and exposing Mr. Poitier to attack as an Uncle Tom when the civil rights movement took a more militant turn in the late 1960s.

“It’s a choice, a clear choice,” Mr. Poitier said of his film parts in a 1967 interview. “If the fabric of the society were different, I would scream to high heaven to play villains and to deal with different images of Negro life that would be more dimensional. But I’ll be damned if I do that at this stage of the game.”

At the time, Mr. Poitier was one of the highest-paid actors in Hollywood and a top box-office draw, ranked fifth among male actors in Box Office magazine’s poll of theater owners and critics; he was behind only Richard Burton, Paul Newman, Lee Marvin and John Wayne. Yet racial squeamishness would not allow Hollywood to cast him as a romantic lead, despite his good looks.

“To think of the American Negro male in romantic social-sexual circumstances is difficult, you know,” he told an interviewer. “And the reasons why are legion and too many to go into.”

Mr. Poitier often found himself in limiting, saintly roles that nevertheless represented an important advance on the demeaning parts offered by Hollywood in the past. In “No Way Out” (1950), his first substantial film role, he played a doctor persecuted by a racist patient, and in “Cry, the Beloved Country” (1952), based on the Alan Paton novel about racism in South Africa, he appeared as a young priest. His character in “Blackboard Jungle” (1955), a troubled student at a tough New York City public school, sees the light and eventually sides with Glenn Ford, the teacher who tries to reach him.

In “The Defiant Ones” (1958), a racial fable that established him as a star and earned him an Academy Award nomination for best actor, he was a prisoner on the run, handcuffed to a fellow convict (and virulent racist) played by Tony Curtis. The best-actor award came in 1964 for his performance in the low-budget “Lilies of the Field,” as an itinerant handyman helping a group of German nuns build a church in the Southwestern desert.

In 1967 Mr. Poitier appeared in three of Hollywood’s top-grossing films, elevating him to the peak of his popularity. “In the Heat of Night” placed him opposite Rod Steiger, as an indolent, bigoted sheriff, with whom Virgil Tibbs, the Philadelphia detective played by Mr. Poitier, must work on a murder investigation in Mississippi. (In an indelible line, the detective insists on the sheriff’s respect when he declares, “They call me Mr. Tibbs!”) In “To Sir, With Love” he was a concerned teacher in a tough London high school, and in “Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner,” a taboo-breaking film about an interracial couple, he played a doctor whose race tests the liberal principles of his prospective in-laws, played by Spencer Tracy and Katharine Hepburn.

Throughout his career, a heavy weight of racial significance bore down on Mr. Poitier and the characters he played. “I felt very much as if I were representing 15, 18 million people with every move I made,” he once wrote...

Still more.

 

Tiya Miles, All That She Carried

Tiya Miles, All That She Carried: The Journey of Ashley's Sack, a Black Family Keepsake.

Charles Murray, Facing Reality

At Amazon, Charles Murray, Facing Reality: Two Truths about Race in America.

Andrew Hacker, Two Nations

At Amazon, Andrew Hacker, Two Nations: Black and White, Separate, Hostile, Unequal.

The Dream is in the Desert

For black Americans, at LAT, "‘We’re here to stay.’ Despite isolation and racism, Black Americans feel at home in California’s desert":

PALM SPRINGS — La’Ronjanae Curtis has grown used to the disbelief of college classmates and friends when she tells them she was born in Palm Springs, a city of 48,000 where people of color are relatively few. “There are Black people out there?” they always say. Curtis proudly tells them that she’s living proof.

Tourists flock to the Coachella Valley and Mojave Desert to take in the psychedelic hues of their sunsets, lose themselves among otherworldly rock formations, and sip drinks poolside at Modernist hideaways in Palm Springs the way Frank Sinatra and the rest of the Rat Pack did in an earlier era.

For the few Black Americans who live in the California desert, it takes willpower to feel at ease in these playgrounds, and imagination to make them feel like home.

In the first half of the last century, hundreds of Black people from the South, and from Los Angeles and the Bay Area, settled in desert communities like Palm Springs. They came for some of the same reasons that drew many white people: plentiful jobs, ample land to put down stakes, and the live-and-let-live openness of what still felt like America’s frontier.

But the picture-postcard settings and air of possibility masked an uglier reality for Black newcomers.

Many towns historically restricted Black families to segregated neighborhoods through housing covenants and lending practices. That legacy lives on.

Today, the presence of an established Black community isn’t obvious when driving through Curtis’ hometown, where low-lying houses hide behind Moorish-style screens, meticulously kept cactus gardens look as untouchable as jewelry displays, and locals ride around their condo complexes in golf carts designed to resemble Mercedes and Rolls Royces.

Most Black residents live far from the carefully constructed fantasy visitors see.

Curtis, who attends San Diego State University, says relatives on both sides of her family migrated from San Francisco in the middle of the last century. They mainly settled in Desert Highland Gateway Estates, a neighborhood of about 400 homes that sits on the wind-whipped northern outskirts — three miles from the Midcentury Modern furniture stores and spray-misted restaurant patios of downtown.

The other historically Black neighborhood, Lawrence Crossley, is at the opposite end of the city near the airport — a single U-shaped street lined with several dozen two- and three-bedroom houses shaded by palms. The lush green of a municipal golf course borders the neighborhood on one side. At the far end, a strip of barren desert.

Dominique Brenagh, 38, takes shelter from the 100-degree heat in the shade of his carport at the small ranch-style house where he grew up and his family still lives.

Brenagh says his father’s relatives moved to Palm Springs in the 1950s from Louisiana in part to escape the segregation and violence of the Jim Crow era.

“Back in those times, you had the KKK out there that was oppressing people,” he says of the South.

Brenagh looks back on his own life as a happy one by comparison. He smiles when reminiscing about sneaking from his backyard onto the golf course to play with friends.

“I love it here,” he says...

Keep reading.