Why would a county in rural North Carolina primarily made up of people of color vote for Donald Trump? That’s just what Robeson County did, giving 58.6 percent of its ballots in 2020 to the President, up from 50.8 percent in 2016. Both by percentage and raw number of votes, support for Trump over the four […]
California Maintains Opposition to Affirmative Action at the Ballot Box
What’s up with affirmative action in a liberal state like California? With nearly two-thirds of California voters saying they backed the Black Lives Matter movement after a summer of protests over racial justice and George Floyd’s murder, Proposition 16, which would have stricken the state’s constitutional ban on affirmative action, lost by a hefty 12 percentage points […]
Voting Can Lift the Soul—with the Help of Jugglers, Pizza, & a Cha-Cha Slide
Jim Hightower, sometimes called America’s favorite populist, said this just before the 2018 elections: Here’s a crazy idea: Make voting fun, a festive occasion for the whole family. In Australia, most polling places have barbecues. America’s democratic pageant doesn’t have to be a grinding obstacle course, an intimidating experience…or boring. After all, it belongs to us. Let’s make […]
Not Always Fair: Revisiting Outdoor Agricultural Exhibitions in 2020
County fairs, with their smells, sights, and sounds of demolition derbies, funnel cake, rodeo queens, midway barkers—and, of course, mules, giant watermelons, and pigs—typically draw millions of Americans in late summer and fall to nearly 2,000 locales across America. But not this year. More than 80 percent are canceled due to the pandemic, harming local economies. Illinois’s 104 […]
Missouri Becomes Sixth State to Expand Medicaid at the Ballot Box
Despite the justified fear that COVID-19 would render the newly energized ballot initiative strategy moot, progressives secured a big win in red state Missouri on Tuesday, overriding the legislature’s and the governor’s persistent refusal to expand Medicaid. It is the sixth state to do so. The Missouri vote, 53 percent “yes” to 47 percent “no,” followed a now-familiar […]
Asheville, the “Paris of the South,” Launches Reparations Commission
When you think of Asheville, North Carolina, you might think of its 50-plus breweries, Art Deco skyline, diverse music venues, River Arts district, proximity to mountains and rivers, and luxury boutique hotels such as the new Asheville Foundry Hotel, recently opened in “The Block,” the city’s former African-American business district. With 93,000 residents and growing, […]
COVID Consequences: The Precarious Position of Shared Governance in Higher Ed
Shared governance—a “tradition unique to the higher education sector”—is imperiled as colleges and universities wrestle with the “brutal math” created by COVID’s shutdown of campuses, long-term shrinking enrollments, and, for public institutions, state funding that never returned to pre-Recession levels. Plus, these same state governments that provide more than half of the public universities’ instructional budgets are […]
The “Black Tax” on Homeownership
New research confirms for the umpteenth time that there literally is a tax on Blackness, in that tax assessors across the country regularly burden Black and brown homeowners with property tax bills that are higher than those levied on Whites. Analyzing more than a decade (2005–2016) of sales and tax assessment data for 118 million homes in […]
Funder Leverages Art to Bend the US South toward Justice
From its start, the Souls Grown Deep Foundation was different than most philanthropic institutions. It began life in 2010 with the donation of 1,300 “overlooked” museum-quality artworks created by African Americans working in the US South after the Civil Rights era, the gift of white collector William S. Arnett. The foundation’s original vision was bold, “born of […]
Tulsa: Where Politics Are a Little Different
Candidate Trump is holding his first post-shutdown rally in Tulsa, Oklahoma, on June 20th, with more than 20,000 supporters expected to fill the city-owned arena, to the horror of public health officials at all levels who cite a doubling of new COVID cases since the highs set in April. Tulsa’s a city in a deep red state […]
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