In a milestone decision decades in the making, Major League Baseball announced Tuesday that it will incorporate the statistics of Negro Leagues that operated in the 1920s, 1930s and 1940s into its record books.
“This initiative is focused on ensuring that future generations of fans have access to the statistics and milestones of all those who made the Negro Leagues possible,” MLB Commissioner Rob Manfred said in a statement provided to the Associated Press.
Black players were barred from MLB until Jackie Robinson broke the league’s color barrier in 1947 when he joined the Brooklyn Dodgers. That breakthrough ultimately led to the Negro Leagues ending play in 1960.
“Their accomplishments on the field will be a gateway to broader learning about this triumph in American history and the path that led to Jackie Robinson’s 1947 Dodger debut,” Manfred said in his statement.
In 2020, in the wake of America’s reckoning with racial injustice following the murder of George Floyd, MLB announced that it was “elevating” seven Negro Leagues that operated from 1920 to 1948 to “major league” status, a move which, at the time, meant approximately 3,400 players in those Negro Leagues could be recognized by MLB for their on-field achievements. Wednesday’s announcement, however, will take that a step further.
The immediate impact of the incorporation will see Josh Gibson, one of baseball’s greatest players, take multiple records from the likes of Ty Cobb and Babe Ruth, per CBS Sports.
During the 12th annual East-West All-Star Game of the Negro Leagues, American baseball player Josh Gibson of the East team creates a cloud of dust as he slides into home plate during the fourth inning at Comiskey Park, Chicago, Illinois, on Aug. 13, 1944. West team’s catcher Ted Radcliffe is visible at right.
Bettmann
Gibson will become the all-time leader in career batting average at .372, passing Cobb’s mark of .366, according to CBS Sports. His career .718 slugging percentage will also be the all-time high mark now, surpassing Ruth’s previous record of .690, and he’ll be the leader in career OPS (on-base plus slugging percentage) with 1.177, passing Ruth’s mark of 1.164.
“When you hear Josh Gibson’s name now, it’s not just that he was the greatest player in the Negro Leagues, but one of the greatest of all time,” Sean Gibson, Gibson’s great-grandson, told USA Today in a statement Tuesday. “These aren’t just Negro League stats. They’re major-league baseball stats.”
In 2020, MLB acknowledged that it was seeking to rectify a 1969 decision by the Special Committee on Baseball Records — a group that was formed to determine which leagues would be recognized as “major leagues.” That 1969 committee recognized six such “major leagues” dating back to 1876, but omitted all Negro Leagues from consideration.
“It is MLB’s view that the committee’s 1969 omission of the Negro Leagues from consideration was clearly an error that demands today’s designation,” the league said in 2020.
The late Hank Aaron played in the Negro Leagues before entering MLB and eventually breaking Ruth’s career home run record. In the 2023 documentary “The League,” he described the challenges Negro League players faced.
“We got one dollar a day meal money, and we would buy one loaf of bread and we would buy a big jar of peanut butter,” Aaron said. “That’s what we lived off of for three or four days.”
— Zoe Christen Jones and Jericka Duncan contributed to this report.
Faris Tanyos is a news editor for CBSNews.com, where he writes and edits stories and tracks breaking news. He previously worked as a digital news producer at several local news stations up and down the West Coast.
UMiss for PalestineFrat boys calling a Black woman a monkey… Who would’ve imagined that sight at a Palestine protest? It was supposed to be a peaceful gathering (aren’t they all?) at the University of Mississippi or Ole Miss, Students gathered to voice their concerns against Israel’s actions in Gaza and urge transparency regarding the university’s ties to the conflict. Instead, acts of #fatshaming, #degredation, #racism and #AmericanFlags clashed with the movement for peace.
Source: ALEX WROBLEWSKI / Getty
What began as a demonstration for justice quickly descended into a horrifying display of hate and deep-rooted issues of race that still plague our nation. Many say those systemic issues remain alive and well at Ole Miss, especially based on how its students behave. No arrests made, and the air is filled with “Lock her up,” and “F*ck Joe Biden” chants. It’s a sickening display like the ones that haunted that land for generations.
The Independent shares that the Black woman seen in the videos bravely held her own against the verbal abuse. Black women continue to be a face for change in real life.
The University of Mississippi, known for its long history of racial injustice, is predominantly white. African-American students only make up 10% of its population, according to the latest enrollment statistics.
Among the chaos, one moment stood out: a white man making monkey noises at a Black woman. In the now-viral videos, you can see horrid views of disgusting young white men waving money around in the woman’s face. Unsurprisingly, the whole time they’re sporting their #Trump paraphernalia with smiles on their faces.
Mississippi Leaders Show Approval Of Racist Counter-Protestors At UMiss for Palestine Demonstration
To make matters worse, local politicians condoned and encouraged this behavior.
The counter-protesters came prepared to intimidate. Waving American and Trump flags, they sang the national anthem to drown out the voices of those pleading for Palestine, recalling the resistant echoes of the civil rights struggle in the US South six decades ago.
“The behavior witnessed today was not only abhorrent but also entirely unacceptable,” stated the University of Mississippi’s chapter of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. “It is deeply disheartening to witness such blatant disregard for the principles of peaceful assembly and freedom of expression,” the organization wrote in a statement posted to Instagram.
On the global stage, protests like those at the University of Mississippi are part of a larger outcry against the treatment of Palestinians, seen in numerous cities worldwide as a plea for humanitarian relief and a cessation of violence in conflict zones like Gaza.
The demonstration lasted less than an hour before police and campus security disbanded for safety reasons, such as flying water bottles. Protests aim to highlight injustices and seek change. Yet, as seen at Ole Miss, they can sometimes expose injustices from within the campus walls.
UMiss For Palestine Issues A Statement In Response To Ole Miss Counter Protestors
UMiss for Palestine, the student group behind the protest, voiced their frustrations.
“We were confronted by counter-protesters who engaged in blind reactionism that had little to do with the genocide we were protesting as well as our demands.” Their call for peace was met with aggression, undermining the very essence of their protest.
It’s no surprise that racist gestures, which one could naively hope were relics of the past, could fester in the same country with leaders like this. When students of color cannot protest without facing racial vilification, it paints a clear picture of the current surrounding culture. Kids are the future.
We must ask ourselves; how can we move forward when the echoes of our darkest hours are still so loud? How can we stand for international justice when we cannot even secure peace and respect within our own borders?
The events at the University of Mississippi are a grim reminder that the fight for justice is far from over, both at home and abroad.
The most recent criminal case involving artificial intelligence emerged last week from a Maryland high school, where police say a principal was framed as racist by a fake recording of his voice.
The case is yet another reason why everyone — not just politicians and celebrities — should be concerned about this increasingly powerful deep-fake technology, experts say.
“Everybody is vulnerable to attack, and anyone can do the attacking,” said Hany Farid, a professor at the University of California, Berkeley, who focuses on digital forensics and misinformation.
Here’s what to know about some of the latest uses of AI to cause harm:
Manipulating recorded sounds and images isn’t new. But the ease with which someone can alter information is a recent phenomenon. So is the ability for it to spread quickly on social media.
The fake audio clip that impersonated the principal is an example of a subset of artificial intelligence known as generative AI. It can create hyper-realistic new images, videos and audio clips. It’s cheaper and easier to use in recent years, lowering the barrier to anyone with an internet connection.
“Particularly over the last year, anybody — and I really mean anybody — can go to an online service,” said Farid, the Berkeley professor. “And either for free or for a few bucks a month, they can upload 30 seconds of someone’s voice.”
Those seconds can come from a voicemail, social media post or surreptitious recording, Farid said. Machine learning algorithms capture what a person sounds like. And the cloned speech is then generated from words typed on a keyboard.
The technology will only get more powerful and easier to use, including for video manipulation, he said.
Authorities in Baltimore County said Dazhon Darien, the athletic director at Pikesville High, cloned Principal Eric Eiswert’s voice.
The fake recording contained racist and antisemitic comments, police said. The sound file appeared in an email in some teachers’ inboxes before spreading on social media.
The recording surfaced after Eiswert raised concerns about Darien’s work performance and alleged misuse of school funds, police said.
The bogus audio forced Eiswert to go on leave, while police guarded his house, authorities said. Angry phone calls inundated the school, while hate-filled messages accumulated on social media.
Detectives asked outside experts to analyze the recording. One said it “contained traces of AI-generated content with human editing after the fact,” court records stated.
A second opinion from Farid, the Berkeley professor, found that “multiple recordings were spliced together,” according to the records.
Farid told The Associated Press that questions remain about exactly how that recording was created, and he has not confirmed that it was fully AI-generated.
But given AI’s growing capabilities, Farid said the Maryland case still serves as a “canary in the coal mine,” about the need to better regulate this technology.
Many cases of AI-generated disinformation have been audio.
That’s partly because the technology has improved so quickly. Human ears also can’t always identify telltale signs of manipulation, while discrepancies in videos and images are easier to spot.
Some people have cloned the voices of purportedly kidnapped children over the phone to get ransom money from parents, experts say. Another pretended to be the chief executive of a company who urgently needed funds.
During this year’s New Hampshire primary, AI-generated robocalls impersonated President Joe Biden’s voice and tried to dissuade Democratic voters from voting. Experts warn of a surge in AI-generated disinformation targeting elections this year.
But disturbing trends go beyond audio, such as programs that create fake nude images of clothed people without their consent, including minors, experts warn. Singer Taylor Swift was recently targeted.
Most providers of AI voice-generating technology say they prohibit harmful usage of their tools. But self enforcement varies.
Some vendors require a kind of voice signature, or they ask users to recite a unique set of sentences before a voice can be cloned.
Bigger tech companies, such as Facebook parent Meta and ChatGPT-maker OpenAI, only allow a small group of trusted users to experiment with the technology because of the risks of abuse.
Farid said more needs to be done. For instance, all companies should require users to submit phone numbers and credit cards so they can trace back files to those who misuse the technology.
Another idea is requiring recordings and images to carry a digital watermark.
“You modify the audio in ways that are imperceptible to the human auditory system, but in a way that can be identified by a piece of software downstream,” Farid said.
Alexandra Reeve Givens, CEO of the Center for Democracy & Technology, said the most effective intervention is law enforcement action against criminal use of AI. More consumer education also is needed.
Another focus should be urging responsible conduct among AI companies and social media platforms. But it’s not as simple as banning Generative AI.
“It can be complicated to add legal liability because, in so many instances, there might be positive or affirming uses of the technology,” Givens said, citing translation and book-reading programs.
Yet another challenge is finding international agreement on ethics and guidelines, said Christian Mattmann, director of the Information Retrieval & Data Science group at the University of Southern California.
“People use AI differently depending on what country they’re in,” Mattmann said. “And it’s not just the governments, it’s the people. So culture matters.”
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Associated Press reporters Ali Swenson and Matt O’Brien contributed to this article.
Protestors are gathering at Antioch Police Department on Sunday to address concerns over the reinstatement of some officers involved in last year’s racist, homophobic and sexist text scandal.
“A bunch of them are starting to get their jobs back and we don’t want them (to),” said Reimagine Antioch’s Frank Sterling Jr., one of the organizers of the rally.
The rally was set to begin at 2 p.m. Sunday in the parking lot of Walgreens on Deer Valley Road in Antioch. The plan — as detailed on First Voice Media’s Facebook page, https://www.facebook.com/firstvoicemedia — was then to move to the police department about 3.5 miles away.
The disturbing texts emerged during an FBI and the Contra Costa County District Attorney’s Office investigation nearly two years ago into allegations of police misconduct in Antioch and Pittsburg. In late April of 2023, the DA’s office released text messages from 17 Antioch officers between 2019 and 2022, though more were involved according to Ellen McDonnell, the county’s chief public defender.
The timing of the rally, Sterling said, is pegged to the one-year anniversary of the text scandal erupting, which led to a number of officers being put on leave.
He says the timing also has to do with it being 10 years since the first time that Malad Baldwin was beaten by Antioch Police in 2014. Baldwin, who sued the city in 2015 after those beatings left him injured, died in 2021.
Sterling also said that Antioch Police have not been forthcoming with information as to which police offciers involved with the racist/homophobic/sexist texts have been reinstated. He also said that demoting an officer, with a history of racism, will not fix the problem.
“I don’t think that is going to cure their racism – getting demoted,” he said.
Racism is often analyzed as a system of oppression that disadvantages people of color across various areas of life. Award-winning investigative reporter Tracie McMillan offers a fresh perspective, instead examining the benefits that white individuals, including herself, receive as a result of racism.
In the author’s first book, The American Way of Eating, McMillan focused heavily on white resentment and the food industry. Now, in The White Bonus: Five Families and the Cash Value of Racism in America, the author merges journalism with memoir to measure the cash benefit – and the cost – of racism for white Americans.
The book, released on April 23, begins with McMillan’s own family and personal history of abuse, illness, and poverty, much of which took place in Michigan. Later, the author interlaces her story with profiles of four other middle-class white subjects, spanning generations and different areas of the country. The final chapter of the book discusses gentrification in Detroit specifically, highlighting McMillan’s own experience of purchasing an affordable home in the city, courtesy of the “bonus of racism” for white people.
The author describes “the white bonus” as an estimate of the money a white person gets or saves because of white supremacy, through “family” and “social” bonuses. For McMillan herself, she estimates that value to be $371,934. Yet, she emphasizes throughout the book that these privileges are not without cost, impacting not only Black Americans but white individuals too.
McMillan’s nationwide tour to promote The White Bonus will include local events in Detroit, Ann Arbor, Oak Park, and Flint from May 7-11.
Metro Times spoke with McMillan, who splits her time between Detroit and Brooklyn, New York, about the book’s concept and connection to Michigan.
The conversation was lightly edited for length and clarity.
How did the idea for the concept of “the white bonus” evolve from your initial inspiration to write this book to what it is now?
“I knew that I wanted to figure out how to write about whiteness and class in a way that served racial justice. The idea for this book really started in my head in 2016, when I saw both Trump’s rise and there was this book, Hillbilly Elegy that people were really excited about and I just felt like Hillbilly Elegy ain’t it, like this is not actually helpful. That book, in my opinion, largely blamed poor people for being poor. I don’t like when that happens to people who aren’t white. I don’t like when that happens to people who are white. For me, as a journalist, I care a lot about poverty, so I wanted to figure out some way to talk about that. Being a Midwestern, sort of lower-middle-class person in New York media, and at the time food circles, most of the people around me had a lot more financial backing than I did. What that meant was that in New York, it often felt like a conversation about white privilege. You would say, ‘Oh, well, you know, white kids, their parents pay for their university.’ And it’s like, ‘Well, that doesn’t really apply to me.’ That doesn’t apply to a lot of white people, but it doesn’t mean that race isn’t working somewhere. So for me, I wanted to figure out how to talk about white advantage for people who aren’t rich, because usually we just sort of mix the two in. The idea specifically for measuring it, that took a couple of years of writing a lot of stuff that I didn’t keep, but trying to figure out what I was thinking about. White privilege as a concept is so slippery, and it’s really easy to just start arguing about, does it exist, which kind of privilege, and I just felt like if you could put a measure on it, we could have a more productive conversation. At least then the conversation is not about does it exist, the conversation is about how big is it. You’ve already assumed that it exists, and that just felt more honest, to go about it that way.”
How would you say that writing and reporting The White Bonus prompted you to confront your race in a new way, uniquely to your first book, The American Way of Eating?
“When I worked on The American Way of Eating, I had decided to write that book in a way where I would take my race and gender really seriously. That felt like an honest way to tell that story. I had gone and worked undercover at a few jobs in the food system; two of those jobs, I was the only white person in either workplace and the only white woman in either workplace … In both of those places, I got treated differently because of my race. Usually, I was treated better. Gender was a mixed bag. In some instances, I was treated with more kindness. Then I write about how at Applebee’s I get sexually assaulted, a co-worker drugs my drink and I get assaulted. That’s also about gender. So for me, it was just really important to reflect those things in my writing and it was the first time that I had sort of time and headspace to really think about how being white and how being a woman was shaping my life. One of the great privileges of being able to write professionally is in some ways I get paid to think about stuff so I can explain it better. So, there’s no way I could have written The White Bonus if I hadn’t spent the first book trying to figure out and get a handle on how my race was shaping my life.”
You’re a professional journalist, but this book is a mix of journalism and memoir. What was it like for you to merge research with such personal stories?
“I wanted to bring in memoir because I couldn’t tell an honest story without it and that’s true on a number of levels. I think it is true in a really practical way because the book is about my financial opportunities and involves tracking what kind of support I’ve gotten from my family. I went through a period during college and for a little while after where I did not talk to my father and stepmother. I did not get any money from them. The reason I did not talk to them is because my experience was that my father was physically abusive, and then everybody was sort of pretending like it wasn’t happening. If I didn’t write about the abuse, I couldn’t explain why I was poor.”
Tracie McMillan splits her time between Detroit and Brooklyn, New York.
“There’s also a deeper reason that gets pulled out later on in the book that, in the [2010s]… all these sort of big public stories about racism, and then the appearance of a forum where you don’t have to get past a gatekeeper to say your piece. So, I’m starting to read more and more and I’m realizing, Black people’s understanding of racism is very different from the one that I was raised with. I’ve seen all this stuff happen and when I’m listening to and reading Black writers talk about what it’s like to experience racism, I’m constantly hearing an echo of the things that I endured, sort of, in an abusive family. It’s not the same thing, it’s a completely different scale and scope and heft, but a lot of racial subjugation are the same things that people use to subjugate kids or partners or people that they’re abusing them in some way. For me, I just felt like that was such a powerful insight about my country, that the thing that gave me empathy for people of color talking about what it was like to live here was abuse. So I felt like I needed to write about it that way as well.”
You talk in the book about living in rural Michigan growing up and then later living in Detroit. How would you say that living in Michigan specifically and writing this book about that helped expand your understanding of class?
“Being from the rural Midwest, I’ve been working since I was 14, that is normal where I grew up. It is not normal for students at NYU. I think just because of the nature of my life, and also because in New York, I’ve written for and been part of fairly elite circles and publications. When I was in college, I worked for a very wealthy family, and I had a really unique opportunity to go up and down the class ladder even in a day. I was working through AmeriCorps at a public high school in New York City, so 7 a.m., start of classes, I’m there with Dominican immigrants, Black New Yorkers, and Chinese immigrant kids, helping them learn to read and navigate high school. Then, I would walk a couple miles uptown to where NYU was and I’d be in classes with people who are the children of movie producers and doctors and have much more financial access — and by the way, very, relatively diverse. NYU had a really diverse student body but most of the kids came from money. I was a scholarship kid, so it was very different for me. Then, in the evenings, I would go work as a nanny-slash-tutor for this family that had a house in Connecticut, the kids had been to seven of the continents already and they were 11 and 14, famous people would come over for dinner, and so most Americans don’t get to go up and down that much. Maybe you sort of get mobility and go up, but particularly because I chose a career as an independent writer, which I’m able to do because I have cheap housing, because I chose that career, some years I have money, some years I don’t. I just go up and down all the time, and that’s really different from how most Americans live, which I think gives me insight that’s really helpful in the kind of work that I do.”
In the final chapter of the book, you talk about Detroit’s gentrification and how “the white bonus” has allowed you to buy property in the city. What would you say you learned specifically about the city of Detroit and the race and class in the city through your research for this book?
“Before I wrote the book, I had a loose understanding that ‘Oh, racism, probably, hasn’t been great for the city,’ in a general sense. But the magic of investigative reporting is that you take those big ideas and you nail them down with facts. The way that the ‘white bonus’ is working for me in Detroit isn’t so much the family bonus, the actual money given to you that you wouldn’t have if you weren’t white, but the ‘white bonus’ here is more the bonus of racism. Racism put the city in super sale, all that predatory lending, it blew up the city’s housing market. The reason that we had so much housing that was so cheap was because of that predatory lending crisis and the cascade of first bank foreclosures and then tax foreclosures. All of that can really clearly be traced back to racism, particularly racism in money. Some of the banks involved… they intentionally targeted Black borrowers and even Black homeowners and convinced them to pull equity out of their homes. That is why the housing in Detroit went on super sale. I did try calling the family that owned my house before it went into foreclosure and they did not want to talk to me about this, understandably. There’s a lot of stigma around mortgages and stuff like that, but I just think, the timing of it, the house that I own went into foreclosure just as the bank foreclosure stuff was getting going. The value of the house was like the median value of houses that went into foreclosure. I just think that it’s highly unlikely I would be able to be a homeowner, particularly as a lower-income writer, if it hadn’t been cheap, and that means I benefited from racism, even though I didn’t do anything to sort of make that happen.”
In the book, you critique mainstream journalists, including yourself, for centering white people, even though the book’s primary subjects are all white. Why did you feel that this focus was uniquely important?
“I don’t think white America ever talks about this. White America never talks about whiteness as an advantage and I think it’s really damaging to our country. I think it’s really damaging to our democracy and our economy to be dishonest about the way that government policy has given more opportunity to white people. We usually talk about racism as this thing that takes away from Black people, it denies Black people opportunities, like you don’t get given a mortgage. That’s one way to look at it. But it is also true that for a mortgage, you get given it or you don’t get given it, but the active thing is the giving. If you didn’t get a mortgage, nothing is happening. If you get a mortgage, something is happening. So, things like [Federal Housing Administration] loans, white people got mortgages so they could become property owners, but we don’t talk about it that way. We don’t talk about it as a choice of government and so it obscures what’s actually happening, which is that the racial wealth gap is largely due to policies that let white families build more wealth than Black families. It’s not only because white families worked harder, made smart decisions, though often they had to do that. It’s that the government gave them the opportunity and made the conditions for stuff to move forward and then we get to white people as voters try to say, ‘We don’t want to spend money and give handouts to people of color because we didn’t have anything,’ except that we did. When we don’t talk about white advantage, it hides it and it strengthens racism and makes it almost impossible to actually start dismantling it. One thing I think about a lot is that there’s all these stories about white people all the time, and the one story we never talk about is that government made it sort of financially beneficial to be white. We never talk about that. That’s a hidden story.”
Why do you feel that Detroiters should read your book?
“Some of the history around racism in Oakland County is just bananas to me. I grew up in Oakland County. I did not know how much of a racist reputation Oakland County had. I did not know that Ferndale was the first northern school district to be sued by the federal government for operating a segregated district. I did not know right that in 197o or ’71, the Ku Klux Klan blew up 10 school buses to try and prolong segregation there. I mean, these are my people. I had no idea about any of this. So I think, particularly for white readers in Detroit, because the previous generations are hiding that stuff from us, I think it’s important to understand. If you’re a white person in Detroit, you can understand some of why Black people might not be super trusting or excited about talking to you and that that history is there. I was raised to be like, ‘I’m colorblind,’ and I should never talk about race. That also makes it really hard for me to be friends with anyone who’s not white because they’re like, ‘What are you doing? You don’t understand reality.’ I want to be able to talk to my neighbors and have them feel like I see them as my equal. That’s important. So for me, just being a good neighbor in Detroit means having some understanding of how racism in the region has worked. The depth of the racism in Oakland County really blew my mind. I did not know that history and it was really humbling and upsetting to learn it.”
The White Bonus: Five Families and the Cash Value of Racism in America is out now.
What do you feel or hope that both white and non-white readers can differently learn from reading The White Bonus?
“I think for white readers, to examine how we think about race and racism and how it impacts our lives. I think, for me, doing this project made me personally much more dedicated to doing work in my communities to try and end racism and mitigate sort of its worst effects. I belong to my tenant organization in Brooklyn, and I’m one of 48 tenants. I’m the only white tenant and the co-chair of the tenant organization and I just sort of resolved that I would put in more work. Understanding so much of how my financial stability has depended on me being white encouraged me to help my neighbors out when I can, and it’s also just on a day-to-day level. The management tends to be more receptive to me than to my other neighbors when we’re making complaints about the building, so there’s a way that I can use the sort of racism that benefits me and hears me more easily than other folks to help people. It’s important to focus on ‘the white bonus,’ but I also write about its costs, about racism’s costs. I think that’s actually one of the more powerful things about doing this measurement process is that once you measure what white people are getting, it frees you up to be honest about what racism costs all of us, including a lot of white people, and you can’t really get there if you can’t admit that it’s a bonus first. So I think for white people, it’s to start thinking about ‘Is this really worth it? Do you get enough because of racism? Do you think staying silent about racism is worth all the things that costs you?’ We don’t have public health care in this country largely because of racism. Higher education and student debt has gotten way worse because of the racism of white voters who wanted to take their taxes out of the system because they were worried about public programs going to Black and brown folks. As the college population gets less white, support for state funding for universities goes down. White Americans keep co-signing on these really punitive programs, making people prove that they deserve help because they think it’s not gonna come for us, but that’s not how it works.”
“For people who aren’t white, I don’t know that any of the broad argument of the book is surprising to anybody. Most people of color are aware that white people have gotten more help than they and their families have. My hope is that it’s like receipts, it’s sort of like, ‘Here’s a compendium, giving you really clear and specific examples of how that is happening.’ I think for both white people and people who aren’t white, if we only focus on the bonus part, which we have to be honest about if we’re not also honest about the cost, I don’t think we’ll get anywhere helpful. Certainly, Black and brown people pay the deepest cost for racism, but a lot of white people need the things that racism ruins. I think that there’s sort of an opportunity to start building a country where we can all work together as equals and live up to the ideals that were told this country holds dear because we don’t, generally speaking, do a very good job of treating everyone like their equal, but if we can start being honest about how racism works, I think there’s an opportunity there to really build.”
(FOX40.COM) — A man who was convicted of four freeway shootings and sentenced to 90 years in prison was approved to be released back into Sacramento County after only serving 14 years.
Kyle Douglas Frank was convicted by a jury for firing several gunshots at cars on four separate occasions in August and September of 2009. His victims were all Black or Hispanic and officials believe his crimes were racially charged.
“He unloaded his gun and put about six bullets in my passenger door, shattered my side view mirror, and all because I looked inside of his car,” said Paul Adcock, a survivor of one of the freeway shootings on I-80 in 2009. “Calling me the N-word and everything else and giving me the finger.”
On April 10, the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation’s Board of Parole Hearings granted parole to Frank.
“I thought justice was done, when they said 90-plus years. It hasn’t even been half of that. So why he’s getting out so soon, is beyond me,” Adcock said.
Sacramento County Assistant Chief Deputy District Attorney Rochelle Beardsley voiced concerns about the possibility of Frank being released from prison.
“It’s our position that he is not eligible or amenable to parole,” Beardsley said. “Public safety is the mandate of the District Attorney’s Office.”
Sacramento County District Attorney Thien Ho’s office warned the public of Frank’s release.
“Each victim was either Hispanic or African American,” the DA’s office said. “He attempted to murder eight innocent people simply because of their skin color.”
The DA’s office said they asked Governor Gavin Newsom to intervene with the boards decision, but if he doesn’t, Frank will be released back into the Sacramento community.
Some of the nation’s biggest companies are discriminating against Black job applicants, according to a new report by the National Bureau of Economic Research. Researchers contacted 97 companies with 80,000 resumes over three years. Evan Rose, a co-author of the “A Discrimination Report Card,” joins CBS News with more details on the research.
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JACKSON, Miss. — A third former Mississippi sheriff’s deputy has been sentenced for his part in the racist torture of two Black men by a group of white officers who called themselves “the Goon Squad.” Daniel Opdyke was sentenced Wednesday to 17.5 years in federal prison.
Opdyke, 28, cried profusely as he spoke in court before the judge announced his sentence. Turning to look at the two victims, he said his isolation behind bars has given him time to reflect on “how I transformed into the monster I became that night.”
“The weight of my actions and the harm I’ve caused will haunt me every day,” Opdyke told them. “I wish I could take away your suffering.”
One of the victims, Eddie Terrell Parker, rested his head in his hands and closed his eyes, then stood up and left the courtroom before Opdyke finished speaking. The other, Michael Corey Jenkins, said he was “broken” and “ashamed” by the cruel acts visited upon him.
U.S. District Judge Tom Lee said Opdyke may not have been fully aware of what being a member of the Goon Squad entailed when Lt. Jeffrey Middleton asked him to join, but he did know it involved using excessive force. “You were not a passive observer. You actively participated in that brutal attack,” Lee said.
All six of the former officers pleaded guilty last year to breaking into a home without a warrant and torturing the Black men with a stun gun, a sex toy and other objects. Christian Dedmon, 29, also faced a lengthy prison term at his sentencing, set for Wednesday afternoon before Lee.
On Tuesday, Lee gave a nearly 20-year prison sentence to Hunter Elward, 31, and a 17.5-year sentence to Middleton, 46, calling their actions “egregious and despicable.” They, like Opdyke and Dedmon, worked as Rankin County sheriff’s deputies during the attack.
Another former deputy, Brett McAlpin, 53, and a former Richland police officer, Joshua Hartfield, 32, are set for sentencing Thursday.
Last March, months before federal prosecutors announced charges in August, an investigation by The Associated Press linked some of the deputies to at least four violent encounters with Black men since 2019 that left two dead and another with lasting injuries.
The former officers stuck to their cover story for months until finally admitting that they tortured Michael Corey Jenkins and Parker. Elward admitted to shoving a gun into Jenkins’ mouth and firing it in a “mock execution” that went awry.
In a statement Tuesday, Attorney General Merrick Garland condemned the “heinous attack on citizens they had sworn an oath to protect.”
The terror began Jan. 24, 2023, with a racist call for extrajudicial violence when a white person in Rankin County complained to McAlpin that two Black men were staying with a white woman at a house in Braxton. McAlpin told Dedmon, who texted a group of white deputies asking if they were “available for a mission.” “No bad mugshots,” he texted — a green light, according to prosecutors, to use excessive force on parts of the body that wouldn’t appear in a booking photo.
Once inside, they handcuffed Jenkins and his friend Parker and poured milk, alcohol and chocolate syrup over their faces. They forced them to strip naked and shower together to conceal the mess. They mocked the victims with racial slurs and shocked them with stun guns. Dedmon and Opdyke assaulted them with a sex toy.
After Elward shot Jenkins in the mouth, lacerating his tongue and breaking his jaw, they devised a coverup that included planting drugs and a gun. False charges stood against Jenkins and Parker for months.
The majority-white Rankin County is just east of the state capital, Jackson, home to one of the highest percentages of Black residents of any major U.S. city. The officers shouted at Jenkins and Parker to “stay out of Rankin County and go back to Jackson or ‘their side’ of the Pearl River,” court documents say.
Opdyke was the first to admit what they did, his attorney Jeff Reynolds said Wednesday. On April 12, he showed investigators a WhatsApp text thread where the officers discussed their plan and what happened. Had he thrown his phone in a river, as some of the other officers did, investigators might not have discovered the encrypted messages.
Reynolds also said Opdyke was sexually assaulted as a child and had seen the older deputies as father figures. That made him susceptible to the culture of misconduct within the Rankin County Sheriff’s Office, Reynolds said.
“When a new officer goes over there, they start indoctrinating people,” Reynolds said. “Where is the true leadership? Why aren’t they in this court?”
On Tuesday, Elward’s attorney also referenced a “culture of corruption” inside the sheriff’s office.
Dedmon, like Opdyke and Elward, also pleaded guilty to taking part in an assault on a white man during a traffic stop on Dec. 4, 2022 — weeks before Jenkins and Parker were tortured. Prosecutors revealed the victim’s identity Tuesday as Alan Schmidt. Reynolds said Opdyke held Schmidt down until Dedmon arrived, but didn’t beat him or sexually assault him.
According to a statement from Schmidt that prosecutors read in court, Dedmon accused him of possessing stolen property. Schmidt said he was handcuffed, pulled from his vehicle and beaten until he “started to see spots.”
Prosecutors said Elward and Opdyke failed to intervene as Dedmon punched and kicked him, used a Taser on him, and fired his gun into the air to threaten him, and then sexually assaulted him.
Schmidt said Dedmon forced him to his knees, pulled out his “private part” and hit him in the face with it, trying to insert it into his mouth. Dedmon then grabbed Schmidt’s genitals and rubbed against his body as he screamed for them to stop, Schmidt said.
“What sick individual does this? has so much power over us already, so to act this way, he must be truly sick in this head,” Schmidt wrote in his statement.
Rankin County Sheriff Bryan Bailey, who took office in 2012 and was reelected in November after no one ran against him, revealed no details about his deputies’ actions when he announced they had been fired last June. After they pleaded guilty in August, Bailey said the officers had gone rogue and promised changes. Jenkins and Parker called for his resignation and filed a $400 million civil lawsuit against the department.
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Michael Goldberg is a corps member for the Associated Press/Report for America Statehouse News Initiative. Report for America is a nonprofit national service program that places journalists in local newsrooms to report on undercovered issues. Follow him at @mikergoldberg.
SAN FRANCISCO — Tesla and a Black man who worked at the company’s California factory have settled a long-running discrimination case that drew attention to the electric vehicle maker’s treatment of minorities.
Owen Diaz, who was awarded nearly $3.2 million by a federal jury last April, reached a “final, binding settlement agreement that fully resolves all claims,” according to a document filed Friday with the U.S. District Court in San Francisco.
The document, which gave no details of the agreement, said both parties agree that the matter has been resolved and the case against the company run by Elon Musk can be dismissed.
Messages were left Saturday seeking details from Tesla lawyers and from Lawrence Organ, Diaz’s attorney.
The April verdict was the second one reached in Diaz’s case seeking to hold Tesla liable for allowing him to be subjected to racial epithets and other abuses during his brief tenure at the Fremont, California, factory run by the pioneering automaker.
But the eight-person jury in the latest trial, which lasted five days, arrived at a dramatically lower damages number than the $137 million Diaz won in his first trial in 2021. U.S. District Judge William Orrick reduced that award to $15 million, prompting Diaz and his lawyers to seek a new trial rather than accept the lower amount.
In November, Organ filed a notice that Diaz would appeal the $3.2 million verdict, and Tesla filed a notice of cross-appeal.
The case, which dates back to 2017, centers on allegations that Tesla didn’t take action to stop a racist culture at the factory located about 40 miles (65 kilometers) southeast of San Francisco. Diaz alleged he was called the “n-word” more than 30 times, shown racist cartoons and told to “go back to Africa” during his roughly nine-month tenure at Tesla that ended in 2016.
The same Tesla plant is in the crosshairs of a racial discrimination case brought by California regulators. Tesla has adamantly denied the allegations made in state court and lashed back by accusing regulators of abusing their authority. The U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission filed a similar complaint in September.
Musk, Tesla’s CEO and largest shareholder, moved the company’s headquarters from Silicon Valley to Austin, Texas, in 2021, partly because of tensions with various California agencies over practices at the Fremont factory.
An Oakland teacher who participated in a controversial pro-Palestinian “teach-in” in December still stands by her actions, saying students deserved to know the details surrounding the deadly conflict between Israel and Hamas.
In December, dozens of teachers within the district participated in an unsanctioned teach-in highlighting pro-Palestinian lessons rather than material in the district-approved curriculum.
The event is believed to be one cause that has since triggered federal investigations by the U.S. Department of Education into alleged civil rights violations and religious discrimination into both the Oakland Unified School District and the San Francisco Unified School District.
One teacher who participated in the controversial “teach-in” told CBS News Bay Area that they stand by their participation to teach curious students the details surrounding the deadly and historic conflict.
“Students are exploring the connections between their own experience between what the U.S. government and why agents with the U.S. government do here and in other places, and just thinking about historical and current context for the situation unfolding in Gaza in the Middle East in general, so I’m proud of our students and staff,” the teacher said.
For the first time since the controversial demonstration, one participating teacher spoke to CBS News Bay Area on the condition of anonymity. She asked only to be identified as a high school teacher within the district.
“It’s more for students to consider multiple perspectives and walk out maybe with some more questions,” the teacher explained. “So, in that sense, I absolutely think that the teacher can encourage that.”
The proposed curriculum has come under fire for containing what Jewish parents and leaders say is antisemitic content.
CBS News reviewed the material that was recommended for grades T-K through high school and found some content that parents and community leaders consider to be antisemitic or offensive to Jewish students. It’s unclear how much of the material was taught during the teach-in.
But the teacher said she did not see any instance of antisemitism take place the day of the demonstration.
“I did not see any evidence of a teacher or student engaging in any antisemitic comment or behavior on the day of the teach-in,” the teacher said. “We might have a difference of opinion on what is antisemitic and I think that yeah, I think criticism of Israel is not antisemitic.”
OUSD did not respond to CBS News Bay Area’s request for comment.
Complaints of religious discrimination are being reported within the San Francisco Unified School District as well.
Tyler Gregory is the leader of the Jewish Community Relations Council. He says San Francisco parents have reported similar activity seen in Oakland of unsanctioned material regarding the ongoing conflict being taught in San Francisco schools where a handful of parents are applying to transfer out.
“The teachers union in San Francisco has said openly anti-Israel, things that make a lot of Jewish students feel unsafe,” he explained. “We’ve seen these Gaza walkouts that are in support of the Palestinians, but have resulted in Jewish students feeling unsafe, and there have been a couple incidents where teachers have participated or encouraged it.”
In a statement, SFUSD told CBS News Bay Area “we are aware that the Department of Education opened a Civil Rights complaint. We are committed to fully cooperating with the investigation. SFUSD policies prohibit discrimination and we take any report of discrimination seriously.”
So far at least 30 Jewish students have transferred out of the OUSD, according to district officials. Gregory says a handful of Jewish students are also planning leave San Francisco Unified.
The U.S. Department of Education and California Department of Education declined to comment on the active investigations.
In Oakland, Shira Avoth is a parent of a middle schooler within the OUSD. She says it was bittersweet when she found out in early March that her son was approved for a transfer into the Piedmont School district after experiencing antisemitism in the classroom.
“It’s heartbreaking and the fact that in 2024 I don’t feel like my son is safe,” she explained.
For this teacher, she feels justified in her participation in furthering the knowledge and education of her students.
“If transferring out was because of an allegation of antisemitism, that learning about Palestine or learning about what’s happening currently in Palestine, for learning about the pellet Palestinian freedom struggle if that is inherently antisemitic,” she explained, “then that would lead us to, I think, an ideological difference. And I think that that’s something that we could maybe continue to talk about and try to, to parse out.”
New Delhi, India – Bidotama, 26, is in the kitchen stirring peanuts in a pan. Every few minutes, she turns to her best friend, Mardza, 25, who is busy chopping tomatoes and slicing U-morok, a hot chilli variety, that will go into the special chicken curry bubbling on a two-burner gas stove.
They speak in their native Meitei language and chuckle as they continue cooking.
In the living room, Akoijam Sunita, 45, is moving a mixture of black perilla seeds, ginger and salt between a heavy pestle mortar and an electric grinder, hoping to get a grainy texture and not a paste. The graininess is key to getting thoiding asuba, a Manipuri side-dish, right.
Bidotama, or Bido as she likes to be called, and Mardza dressed in those comfy, furry pants the young like to live in these days, have been up since 4:30am cooking for a Sunday lunch service that they run out of Akoijam’s three-bedroom apartment in New Delhi.
Until May last year, both Bido and Mardza worked as digital marketing managers in Imphal, the capital of Manipur in India’s northeast. Akoijam, or Akoi as she is referred to, was their Delhi-based team leader.
Mardza and Bido cooking food for Lombard Kitchen at the New Delhi apartment of their friend, Akoi [Suparna Sharma/Al Jazeera]
Now Bido and Mardza are Akoi’s house guests and she is their business partner in the lunch service they have started in an attempt to rebuild their lives after they were wrenched from their homes in Manipur in the wake of ethnic violence that broke out in May. It has left over 200 people dead and thousands injured, and turned the beautiful, scenic state with the world’s only floating national park, into a ravaged war zone.
A day after violence erupted, Manipur was placed under curfew and an internet ban was imposed that lasted till December. In those seven months, many businesses shut down, including Bido and Mardza’s.
In the clashes between the dominant, largely Hindu Meitei community and the minority Christian Kuki-Zo community, many have lost their homes and continue to live in relief camps in Manipur or, like Bido and Mardza, fled the state fearing for their lives and in search of a livelihood.
[Clockwise from top right] A pressure cooker with dal, chayote squash, lightly boiled Manipuri chicken curry with king chillies and kambong kanghou, a stir-fry dish made with brinjal, crispy peanuts and water bamboo [Suparna Sharma/ Al Jazeera]
In the New Delhi apartment, all three women find solace in cooking, eating, talking about their food and running the Lomba Kitchen.
“This meal from Lomba Kitchen is Yum Gi mathel,” types Akoi on her phone as she composes a brief note about the Manipuri dishes. She will WhatsApp it to customers as the food parcels are sent out for delivery later in the day.
Their enterprise is named after a purple-coloured herb that looks like lavender and has a citrusy aroma and a peppery taste – the Lomba. It flowers around October-November and is used as a garnish in several Manipuri dishes.
“The name Lomba has meaning … When we think of winter, we think of Lomba. It reminds us of home,” says Bido.
Akoi crushes some Lomba flowers and sprinkles them on eromba, a mash made with yendem (colocasia) stalks, beans, sponge gourd, potatoes and fermented grilled fish. In the text she is sending to customers, she calls it “an object of our unconditional love”.
It’s 7am, and New Delhi’s temperature has dropped to a freezing single digit. But Akoi’s apartment, where the Sunday lunch menu is slowly coming together, is warm with the aroma of Manipur.
Akoijam Sunita, 45, at a pop-up dinner she hosted in Bengaluru, India, recently [Photo courtesy Lomba Kitchen]
‘Dirty food’
Roughly 1,500 miles from New Delhi, Manipur is one of the seven ‘sister states’ in the northeast that is geographically connected by a narrow 200km (120-mile) strip of land called the Chicken’s Neck to India’s mainland.
Most people from the northeast have distinct physical features and culinary traditions that add to India’s much-vaunted diversity. But incidents of racial discrimination, even verbal and physical abuse for their food choices, are routine in cities they migrate to, like New Delhi and Mumbai.
Staples like fermented bamboo shoots, soya bean paste and dried fish are added to northeastern dishes for their meaty, savoury aroma and umami flavour – one of the five core tastes that include sweet, sour, bitter and salty.
In her 2022 paper on “Dirty Food, racism and casteism in India”, anthropologist Dolly Kikon gives the instance of landlords and neighbours finding the food cooked by people from the northeast “stinky and revolting”, a reaction that, she says, stems from “ignorance of the eclectic food cultures in northeast India”.
The 2019 Bollywood film Axone, about a group of friends cooking the northeastern delicacy akhuni (or axone) with pork and strong-smelling, fermented soya beans, captures the hate that northeastern food often faces in the rest of India.
“My food has been so racially attacked that I always wanted to do something around food … When they [Bido and Mardza] came to stay here, we started talking about cooking … Maybe invite people over for a Manipuri meal,” Akoi says and then laughs as she adds, “But we didn’t have a dining table.”
Cooking chicken with king chilli [Suparna Sharma/Al Jazeera]
‘The drums fell quiet’
”I’m here and she’s over there. We have a river in the middle,” says Bido, gesturing to explain where she and Mardza live – across the Nambul river that runs through Imphal, a city where the sun comes up early and the streets get crowded by 6am.
On alternate days, Bido and Mardza would set off around 4am to buy vegetables from the Ima Keithel or Mothers’ Market, the largest all-women market in the world. And then they would cook for both their families before heading to work.
May 3, 2023, was no different.
After finishing work, Mardza filled petrol in her car, dropped Bido and went home.
It was around 8pm when Bido heard someone banging an electric pole with a stone – a common way to alert the neighbourhood and get people to gather for any information or disturbing news.
ngari, a dried, fermented fish, being grilled [Suparna Sharma/Al Jazeera]
Bido came out and heard from the people who had gathered that there had been clashes between members of the Meitei and Kuki-Zo communities in Churachandpur, a hill district 200km (120 miles) from Imphal. Houses were being burned and there had been incidents of firing.
“It started raining,” says Bido, and under the soft solar street lights, she saw a religious procession coming her way. “I could see women on horseback, people dancing and singing because Lainingthou Sanamahi, considered the king of all gods, was returning to the local shrine,” Bido says.
The chatter in her community about the violence was getting louder and suddenly, she recalls, “The procession stopped … The clarinets, the drums fell quiet … It was eerie.”
The Meiteis, who are politically strong, live in and around the Imphal valley, occupying about 10 percent of the state’s land.
Kukis live predominantly in the hills and are listed as Scheduled Tribes, a constitutional protection given to historically disadvantaged tribes. It comes with certain guarantees, including job reservations and land rights.
For years, Meiteis have been demanding their inclusion in the Scheduled Tribes list, which would entitle them to jobs and government loans, and also give them the right to buy tribal land in the hill districts.
Their demand has been rejected in the past, but on March 27, 2023, a court directed the Manipur government to consider including Meiteis in the Scheduled Tribe list, triggering protests and clashes.
Manipuri chicken and dal, prepared at Lomba Kitchen in New Delhi [Suparna Sharma]
“Our neighbourhood was not affected by violence,” says Bido, but adds that there was constant fear of being attacked, often fuelled by rumours.
May 5, 2023, was one such night when a rumour swirled about three armed Kuki men hiding in the river. “Everyone was so delusional, so paranoid,” Bido recalls.
At 1am, several men from her locality jumped into the river and began searching for the armed men. On Mardza’s side, people were out with big flashlights scanning the water for signs of humans.
Bido could not sleep at night. Lying awake, the slightest sound would make her panic.
In anticipation of a sudden attack, she kept her sneakers close and packed a small school bag. It had her educational certificates, a couple of candles, a matchbox, a T-shirt, a water bottle, some paracetamol, cyclopam tablets for menstrual pain and three Choco Pies.
When Bido and Mardza eventually left Manipur at the end of May, they carried a small suitcase and a red handbag: They had packed some summer clothes, ngari (fermented) fish, fermented bamboo shoots and dry chillies. The plan was to get away for a few days, get some sleep, get some work and, when the violence subsided, to return home.
Bido, 26, getting meal trays ready. The meal she is putting together is called yum gi mathel. On a plate on the left rests Lomba, a herb that looks like lavender and has a citrusy aroma [Suparna Sharma/ Al Jazeera]
Something sour
It’s 9:30am in Akoi’s apartment, the electric rice cooker’s lid is bobbing with steam and her large coffee table is starting to fill up.
There’s a pressure cooker filled with hawai thongba (split lentils cooked with chives, smoked green chillies and garnished with dill), Mardza’s chicken curry (yen thongba) and kambong kanghou – a stir-fry dish made with brinjal, crispy peanuts and water bamboo that a store in New Delhi sources from around Manipur’s Loktak lake.
“In Manipur, meals end with something sour. Usually, it’s a fruit sprinkled with dry-roasted chickpea flour and red chilli powder,” says Akoi.
But since that is not practical, the Lomba Kitchen sends a little surprise gift with its meals. Last week it was black rice kheer, this week it is thoiding asuba – a traditional Manipuri condiment that Akoi has ground to perfection and is now rolling into Oreo-sized little patties in her gloved hands.
In June last year, just weeks after Bido and Mardza had flown into New Delhi, when they were missing home and wanted to go back, a video of two women from the Kuki-Zo community being paraded naked and sexually abused by a mob surfaced.
It sparked national outrage and fear.
“This had never happened in our generation in Manipur. There were a lot of bandhs, blockades, but nothing like this. Our generation was very happy. We thought it [the violence] would be contained by the next day … or in a few days. It’s now been … what?” Bido asks Mardza.
“Nine months,” she replies.
Their parents are still in Imphal and refused to leave with their daughters. Bido and Mardza talk to them on video calls regularly. Firing and deaths, they say, are now a part of everyday conversation.
“Earlier we would get triggered by the news of death … Now, when we hear some person died, we’re like, ‘Oh, where?’… I think that part of us died … the emotion part,” says Bido.
Meal trays are filled with food before being delivered [Suparna Sharma/Al Jazeera]
Comfort food
After several stressful weeks of trial and error, the Lomba Kitchen team has cracked the toughest part of their enterprise – packing food and making sure that the meals are delivered on time.
Several rows of black plastic meal trays are laid out neatly on the coffee table.
Beginning from the top right, Bido starts putting in the stir-fry, then the dal. Mardza adds the chicken, Bido puts in eromba, carefully wiping the edges, ensuring there are no spills anywhere. Finally, on top of the rice, she places two long slices of daskus champhut (chayote squash, lightly boiled).
Together, and with Akoi’s help, Bido and Mardza have found a rhythm of life in Delhi.
In a room full of cardboard boxes with stuff left behind by friends that Akoi and her husband have taken in over the years, Bido and Mardza have negotiated a small world of their own. A laptop sits on a small study table and their clothes are neatly folded and kept on the bags they arrived with.
They have found new clients and resumed their digital marketing work. On weekends, they run Lomba Kitchen.
Bido, 26, and Mardza, 25, in their room in New Delhi [Suparna Sharma/Al Jazeera]
Mardza and Bido talk wistfully about weekends spent driving out of Imphal valley with their mats, food and friends. They would settle on a hill from where they had a panoramic view of the city and the Loktak lake.
Bido says she often dreams of her home, of Manipur, of the tree-lined university campus with “overgrown grass” where she completed her graduation.
But in her nightmares, triggered by news of violence from Manipur, she sees people running after her or watches herself being killed.
“Sometimes,” she says, “I lose my s***… When I am closer to nature I have better control of myself.”
Bido, a literature student, is expressive and often, mid-sentence, breaks into Meitei language to ask Mardza a question, to confirm a fact, or to hand her something.
Mardza, who has a master’s in microbiology, is the quieter of the two. She finishes Bido’s sentences and fills in the gaps with details and dates.
So what’s your favourite dish, I ask Mardza, trying to get her to talk.
She falls silent for so long that Bido gets impatient and blurts out while shaking with laughter: “What’s the dish you would eat if you were to die today?”
After attending school in Finland and later the U.S., Belgium and the U.K., Stubb entered politics in 2004 as a member of the European Parliament. He hit the Finnish big time in 2008 when — to his own surprise — he was named foreign minister.
Praised by allies for his high-energy approach to politics, he was also criticized during his time in government for his occasionally hasty statements, and was forced to apologize after being accused of swearing at a meeting of the Nordic Council, a regional cooperation body.
During a difficult year as prime minister in 2014 he failed to reverse his NCP’s declining popularity, and lost a parliamentary election in 2015 amid an economic slump. After a subsequent spell as finance minister he quit Finnish politics in 2017, vowing never to return.
During the five-month presidential election campaign, observers say, Stubb earned the support of voters by demonstrating a calmer and more thoughtful demeanor during debates than had been his custom, and for being at pains to show respect for his rivals.
“However this election goes, it will be good for Finland,” he said in a debate with Haavisto earlier last week.
Stubb has said he intends to be a unifying force in Finnish society, something the country appears to need after a series of racism scandals involving government ministers and, more recently, strikes over work conditions and wages that paralyzed public services.
For decades, the University of Pennsylvania has held hundreds of skulls that once were used to promote white supremacy through racist scientific research.
As part of a growing effort among museums to reevaluate the curation of human remains, the Ivy League school laid some of the remains to rest last week, specifically those identified as belonging to 19 Black Philadelphians. Officials plan to hold a memorial service for them on Saturday.
The university says it is trying to begin rectifying past wrongs. But some community members feel excluded from the process, illustrating the challenges that institutions face in addressing institutional racism.
“Repatriation should be part of what the museum does, and we should embrace it,” said Christopher Woods, the museum’s director.
The university houses more than 1,000 human remains from all over the world, and Woods said repatriating those identified as from the local community felt like the best place to start.
Some leaders and advocates for the affected Black communities in Philadelphia have pushed back against the plan for years. They say the decision to reinter the remains in Eden Cemetery, a local historic Black cemetery, was made without their input.
West Philadelphia native and community activist aAliy A. Muhammad said justice isn’t just the university doing the right thing, it’s letting the community decide what that should look like.
“That’s not repatriation. We’re saying that Christopher Woods does not get to decide to do that,” Muhammad said. “The same institution that has been holding and exerting control for years over these captive ancestors is not the same institution that can give them ceremony.”
As the racial justice movement has swept across the country in recent years, many museums and universities have begun to prioritize the repatriation of collections that were either stolen or taken under unethical circumstances. But only one group of people often harmed by archaeology and anthropology, Native Americans, have a federal law that regulates this process.
In cases like that between the University of Pennsylvania and Black Philadelphians, institutions maintain control over the collections and how they are returned.
The remains of the Black Philadelphians were part of the Morton Cranial Collection at the Penn Museum. Beginning in the 1830s, physician and professor Samuel George Morton collected about 900 crania, and after his death the Academy of Natural Sciences of Philadelphia added hundreds more.
Morton’s goal with the collection was to prove — by measuring crania — that the races were actually different species of humans, with white being the superior species. His racist pseudoscience influenced generations of scientific research and was used to justify slavery in the antebellum South.
Morton also was a medical professor in Philadelphia, where most doctors of his time trained, said Lyra Monteiro, an anthropological archaeologist and professor at Rutgers University. The vestiges of his since-disproven work are still evident across the medical field, she said.
“Medical racism can really exist on the back of that,” Monteiro said. “His ideas became part of how medical students were trained.”
The collection has been housed at the university since 1966, and some of the remains were used for teaching as late as 2020. The university issued an apology in 2021 and revised its protocol for handling human remains.
The university also formed an advisory committee to decide next steps. The group decided to rebury the remains at Eden Cemetery. The following year, the university successfully petitioned the Philadelphia Orphans’ Court to allow the burial on the basis that the identities of all but one of the Black Philadelphians were unknown.
Critics note the advisory committee was comprised almost entirely of university officials and local religious leaders, rather than other community members.
Monteiro and other researchers challenged the idea that the identities of the Philadelphians were lost to time. Through the city’s public archives, she discovered that one of the men’s mothers was Native American. His remains must be repatriated through the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act, the federal law regulating the return of Native American ancestral remains and funerary objects, she said.
“They never did any research themselves on who these people were, they took Morton’s word for it,” Monteiro said. “The people who aren’t even willing to do the research should not be doing this.”
The university removed that cranium from the reburial so it can be assessed for return through NAGPRA. Monteiro and others were further outraged to discover the university had already interred the remains of the other Black Philadelphians last weekend outside of public view, she said.
Members of the Black Philadelphians Descendant Community Group, which was organized by people including Muhammed who identify as descendants of the individuals in the mausoleum, said in a statement they are “devastated & hurt” that the burial took place without them.
“In light of this new information, they are taking time to process and consider how best to honor their ancestors at a future time,” the group said, adding that members plan to offer handouts at Saturday’s memorial with information they have gathered on the individuals in the mausoleum.
“To balance prioritizing the human dignity of the individuals with conservation due diligence and the logistical requirements of Historic Eden Cemetery, laying to rest the 19 Black Philadelphians was scheduled ahead of the interfaith ceremony and blessing,” the Penn Museum said in a statement to The Associated Press.
Woods said he believes most of the community is happy with the decision to reinter the remains at Eden Cemetery, and it is a vocal minority in opposition. He hopes that eventually all the individuals in the mausoleum will be identified and returned.
“We encourage research to be done moving forward,” Woods said, noting the remains of the Black Philadelphians were in the collection for two centuries and, along with his staff, he felt the need to take more immediate action with those remains.
“Let’s not let these individuals sit in the museum storeroom and extend those 200 years anymore,” he said.
Even if all the crania are identified and returned to the community, the university has a long way to go. More than 300 Native American remains in the Morton Cranial Collection still need to be repatriated through the federal law. Woods said the museum recently hired additional staff to expedite that process.
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Graham Brewer is a member of AP’s Race and Ethnicity team. Follow him on social media.
COLUMBIA, S.C. — Four years after South Carolina removed the Confederate battle flag from its Statehouse grounds, Nikki Haley offered two separate explanations of the flag’s meaning in less than a week.
Haley, the state’s governor when the flag was pulled in 2015 from its place of honor in Columbia, said in a 2019 interview with conservative radio host Glenn Beck that the man who shot and killed eight Black churchgoers in Charleston — murders that were the impetus for the flag’s lowering — had “hijacked” a symbol that many people took to stand for “service and sacrifice and heritage.” Two days later, she wrote in the Washington Post, “Everyone knows the flag has always been a symbol of slavery, discrimination and hate for many people.”
The two messages capture Haley’s sometimes contradictory messages on race. Throughout her career, the South Carolina-born daughter of Indian immigrants has generally called out acts of individual prejudice and the people responsible. But Haley, now a Republican presidential candidate, has avoided denouncing society or groups of people as racist.
As the GOP primary race moves to South Carolina and its Feb. 24 contest, Haley is trying to cut into former President Donald Trump’s advantage. He has repeatedly attacked adversaries throughout his career with racist language, trying to appeal to as many voters as possible without alienating conservatives who reject the idea that systemic racism exists in the United States.
But Haley’s approach has drawn bipartisan criticism at times, particularly after a December town hall when Haley refused to say slavery had been a cause of the Civil War. She later walked back those remarks, saying that “of course the Civil War was about slavery.”
Haley was pushed for more answers on her feelings about race when she was interviewed Wednesday on “The Breakfast Club,” a nationally syndicated hip hop morning radio show on which presidential candidates and other politicians have discussed issues of race.
Asked about the 2015 shooting at Charleston’s Mother Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church, Haley told co-host Charlamagne tha God that the national media “came in and wanted to define” the event and “wanted to make it about racism.” Haley acknowledged, after being pressed, that the killings were “motivated” by racism. Dylann Roof, a white man, was convicted and sentenced to death.
The Haley campaign did not respond to a request for comment.
Haley and Trump are competing for votes both along South Carolina’s rapidly growing coast with its booming aerospace and defense industries and in the rural swaths of a state where the Civil War began more than 150 years ago. Some in South Carolina still venerate the Confederate cause and play down the fact that Southern political leaders wanted to secede to keep slavery intact, as well as the lasting legacy of official federal and state discrimination against Black people.
Haley, who was Trump’s U.N. ambassador, has described facing prejudice in her upbringing in rural Bamberg.
“My parents never wanted us to think we lived in a racist country,” Haley told reporters recently. “I don’t want any brown, Black or other child thinking they live in a racist country. I want them to know they can do and be anything they want to be without anyone getting in the way.”
Hajar Yazdiha, a sociology professor at the University of Southern California, argued that Haley was making a conscious choice to better appeal to conservatives.
“Nikki Haley will strategically deploy her identity in one moment and not the next. So in one moment, she’s drawing out that history,” Yazdiha said. “She’s really claiming her ethnic identity and using it to tell a compelling story about the American dream. And then on the other, she’s minimizing it and erasing it and acting like it has no bearing on who she is.”
At a recent Haley rally in North Charleston, Terry Holyfield said she applauded Haley’s push to bring down the Confederate flag. Holyfield said it was “the right thing to do at that time, and I applaud her for standing by her beliefs.”
About the cause of the Civil War, Holyfield said she stood by her preferred candidate’s answer.
“She answered that question intelligently and correctly,” Holyfield said. “Our government was different than it is now, and our Constitution was different, and she answered that question spot on.”
People of color seeking high office have long faced disproportionate pressure to talk about race, especially before white audiences.
During his own presidential bid last year, U.S. Sen. Tim Scott, a fellow South Carolinian and the only Black Republican in the chamber, often talked to all-white groups in Iowa about personal responsibility and how “we don’t have Black poverty or white poverty. We have poverty.” Entrepreneur Vivek Ramaswamy, who is Hindu, was often challenged by Christians in Iowa about whether they worshipped the same God. Both Scott and Ramaswamy have dropped from the nomination contest and endorsed Trump.
Haley sometimes ties her upbringing to politics, mentioning how her mother criticizes people crossing the U.S.-Mexico border without permission because she herself immigrated legally. But Haley has also had to contend with attacks from Trump based on her ethnicity.
Trump called Haley “Nimbra” on his social media site in a recent post. That was an apparent intentional misspelling of part of her birth name, Nimarata Nikki Randhawa. Haley has used her middle name, “Nikki,” since childhood.
Trump also has promoted false conspiracy theories about whether Haley was eligible to run for president because she is the U.S.-born daughter of immigrants. Her birth in South Carolina makes her a natural-born citizen, one of three qualifications to hold the U.S. presidency. Trump’s promotion of this false claim echoes his “birther” rhetoric about Barack Obama, the nation’s first Black president.
When asked by reporters whether Trump’s criticisms of her are racist, Haley has instead portrayed him as “desperate to stop our momentum,” using any means necessary to attack his opponents.
“That’s what he does when he feels threatened. That’s what he does when he feels insecure,” Haley said during a town hall on CNN when asked about Trump’s false allegation that she was ineligible to be president. “I know that I am a threat. I know that’s why he’s doing that.”
She often uses her own story as an example that the U.S. is fundamentally good.
“We live in the best country in the world and we are a work in progress, and we’ve got a long way to go to fix all of our little kinks. But I truly believe our Founding Fathers had the best of intentions when they started, and we fixed it along the way,” Haley said as she struggled to make her point during a CNN town hall last month in New Hampshire, where host Jake Tapper asked her if, from a historical perspective, she believed that America had “never been a racist country.”
Tapper argued that “America was founded institutionally on many racist precepts, including slavery.” Haley responded with a reference to the line that “all men are created equal,” but then finished her thought by saying that “the intent was everybody was going to be created equally.”
In her memoirs and public appearances, Haley has often recounted experiencing discrimination during her childhood: bullying, comments about her ethnicity in school, being disqualified from a beauty pageant for being neither white nor Black. Her father, a professor at a historically Black university, was racially profiled at a farmer’s market.
Haley says she dealt with racism through bridge-building.
“This habit of finding the similarities and avoiding the differences became very natural to me over time,” she wrote in her 2012 memoir.
During a 2014 visit to India, Haley spoke with an Indian news channel about her heritage and discrimination. Asked whether she felt the need to “disown” parts of her heritage to work in American politics, Haley said her background was core to her identity.
“I’m very, very proud of being the daughter of Indian parents, and I talk about it because it’s something that’s very special to me,” Haley said. “It is who I am.”
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Associated Press writers Holly Ramer in Hollis, New Hampshire, and Noreen Nasir in New York contributed to this report.
___
Meg Kinnard can be reached at http://twitter.com/MegKinnardAP and Matt Brown can be reached at http://twitter.com/mrbrownsir.
___
This story was first published on Feb. 1, 2024. It was published again on Feb. 2, 2024, to make clear in the headline that Haley has rejected talk of systemic racism.
A new study looking at the effects of racial bias in the retail industry proposes focusing on the behavior of shoppers rather than their appearance. The study, commissioned by Sephora, also proposes other changes to protocols that may help eliminate certain aspects of racial bias. Joann Lublin, a contributor for the Wall Street Journal, joins CBS News to discuss.
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During a recent interview, Republican presidential candidate Nikki Haley said that America had “never been a racist country.” The Onion asked Americans why our history has always been color-blind, and this is what they said.
Harold Lucas, Retired
“If we’re so racist, you’d think someone would’ve committed a racist act by now.”
Ashley Moreno, Chef
“Thomas Jefferson wrote that ‘all men are created equal’ and never did anything else as far as I know.”
Bridget Tate, Homemaker
“Show me one book that says otherwise. Or several. In list form, please. No particular reason.”
Paul Gruber, Warehouse Manager
Paul Gruber, Warehouse Manager
“America is not a racist country, but a federation of racist states.”
Bianca Mir, Truck Driver
“Have you ever met a slave? Didn’t think so.”
Teddy Bryant, Lifeguard
“I’ve never faced any discrimination for being 3% Cherokee.”
Marty Gilman, Sales Associate
Marty Gilman, Sales Associate
“This so-called racist nation is the same one that gave Black Americans their own exclusive water fountains.”
Patricia Wayne, Personal Chef
Patricia Wayne, Personal Chef
“Why else would Martin Luther King so eloquently say that racism was a fiction and we should get on with our lives?”
Lily Rhodes, Bank Teller
“I think this 90-second PragerU cartoon can explain the concept better than me or anyone else.”
Susan Combs, Teacher
“How many times do I have to cite very selective lines from the Constitution before people understand this?”
Charles Hampton, Park Ranger
Charles Hampton, Park Ranger
“America has always been a land of opportunity for all different types of land-owning white men.”
Angelo Townsend, Barista
“Does the United States discriminate against non-white people? Sure. But is it racist? Nah, probably not.”
Rory Bond, Optician
“It’s not racism when it’s accidental, which is what slavery, Jim Crow, and every modern hate crime are.”
Rachel O’Hara, Bartender
Rachel O’Hara, Bartender
“All egalitarian societies begin with mass genocide.”
Rod Richards, Pilot
“My great-grandfather loved his slaves.”
Bianca Underwood, Meteorologist
Bianca Underwood, Meteorologist
“Most of our mass shooters target very diverse crowds of innocent people.”
Nikki Haley has come to generally be seen as the least horrible choice of all the Republican presidential candidates left in the 2024 race. Of course, this is an incredibly low bar with Donald Trump and Ron DeSantis being the other options. However, she’s been undermining her “reasonable” image lately when it comes to race and racial relations.
The former governor of South Carolina made headlines recently for her response to a pretty basic question at a town hall in New Hampshire: “What was the cause of the Civil War?” The answer is obviously slavery. Some states (like hers!) wanted to keep it and some didn’t. But could she just say that? No, she couldn’t. She said it was about how the government would run … and freedoms. No mention of slavery. To which she got called out by a voter and subsequently much of the country at large. She didn’t seem to learn though, as she has made another extremely questionable racial statement.
In a Fox News interview with Brian Kilmeade, Haley was asked if the GOP is a racist party. Her response? “We’re not a racist country, Brian. We’ve never been a racist country.” But wait, there’s more! She went on to add: “I know I faced racism when I was growing up. But I can tell you, today is a lot better than it was then. Our goal is to lift up everybody. Not go and divide people on race or gender or party or anything else. We’ve had enough of that in America.”
So Haley has experienced racism but that’s just an individual-level problem? Systemic racism doesn’t exist? Sure. This is clearly illogical but she wasn’t called out for it at that moment because, well, Fox News. I hope someone asks her that question again and makes her elaborate in a different setting that doesn’t have a deep foundation of racism itself.
Furthermore, the idea that the goal of denying racism exists at an institutional level is to “lift up everybody” is ridiculous and only serves to benefit those racist systems and the (white) people at the top. She then goes on to say the goal is not to divide people on race or gender or anything else etc. Really? Remind me again what party she’s running under. Her own problematic views aside, she worked directly under Divider in Chief Donald Trump and refuses to say outright that she won’t support him if he were the nominee.
The official Haley campaign released a statement doubling down on the statements she made during the Fox News interview. “America has always had racism, but America has never been a racist country,” a Haley spokesperson said, per CNN.
The spokesperson added: “The liberal media always fails to get that distinction. It can throw a fit, but that doesn’t change Nikki’s belief that America is special because its people are always striving to do better and live up to our founding ideals of freedom and equality.”
Talk about a divisive statement! Undercutting all the Black and brown people constantly working to call out and fight racism, just to blame the “liberal media” for all of it. People have to hold these candidates’ feet to the fire. When conservatives blame all the country’s evils on the “liberal media” and no one makes them explain what they are actually talking about, they’re allowed to continue with their nonsense.
Haley and others like her are wrong in the notion that America can’t simultaneously be racist AND be striving to do better. If we aren’t racist, why are we striving to do better? Hmmmm, Nikki? Saying we have had racism but are not a racist country, at least to me, implies that all of our issues are in the past. Which is just not true. Our past is horrific obviously, but it has impacted nearly every aspect of our society still to this day. This is a view backed by research, but Republicans like Haley cannot admit this because their voters need to believe that they are the real victims of today’s modernized and culturally diverse nation. And that’s the real truth.
I think Haley knows this but politically she cannot admit it. Welcome to the modern GOP.
Courting Black voters he needs to win reelection, President Biden on Monday denounced the “poison” of white supremacy in America, declaring at the site of a deadly racist church shooting in South Carolina that such ideology has no place in America, “not today, tomorrow or ever.”
Mr. Biden spoke from the pulpit of Mother Emanuel AME Church, where in 2015 nine Black parishioners were shot to death by the White stranger who had invited to join their Bible study. The Democratic president’s speech followed his blunt remarks last Friday on the eve of the anniversary of the Jan. 6, 2021, riot at the U.S. Capitol, in which he excoriated former President Donald Trump for “glorifying” rather than condemning political violence.
At Mother Emanuel, Mr. Biden said “the word of God was pierced by bullets of hate, propelled not just by gunpowder, but by poison.”
“White supremacy,” he said, the view by some whites that they are superior to everyone else is a “poison that for too long has haunted this nation. This has no place in America, not today, tomorrow or ever.”
President Biden speaks at the historic Mother Emanuel AME Church in Charleston South Carolina on Jan. 8, 2024.
Peter Zay/Anadolu via Getty Images
The importance of South Carolina
The speech was a grim way to kick off a presidential campaign, particularly for someone known for his unfailing optimism and belief that American achievements are limitless. But it’s a reflection of the emphasis Mr. Biden and his campaign are placing on energizing Black voters amid deepening concerns among Democrats that the president could lose support from this critical constituency heading into the election.
It was South Carolina’s support for Mr. Biden that catapulted him to clinch the nomination during the Democratic primaries in 2020. The president has accurately attributed much of his success to Rep. Jim Clyburn of South Carolina, who sat behind the president as he spoke on Monday.
A recent USA Today/Suffolk University poll found one in five Black voters who supported Mr. Biden in 2020 now say they will support a third-party candidate in November. A concern among Democrats is that Black voters might stay home in November. During a gaggle with reporters after the speech Monday, Biden campaign officials told reporters dismissed those polls and said voters would decide the election.
The president’s campaign advisers and aides hoped the South Carolina visit would successfully lay out the stakes of the race in unequivocal terms three years after the cultural saturation of Trump’s words and actions while he was president. It’s a contrast they hope will be paramount to voters in 2024.
Mr. Biden also used the speech, his second major campaign event of the year, to thank the state’s Black voters, recognizing their and Clyburn’s indispensable support in 2020.
“I owe you,” he said.
Mr. Biden’s speech was briefly interrupted when several people upset by his staunch support for Israel in its war against Hamas called out that if he really cared about lives lost he would call for a cease-fire in Gaza to help innocent Palestinians who are being killed under Israel’s bombardment. The chants of “cease-fire now” were drowned out by audience members chanting “four more years.”
President Biden speaks at the historic Mother Emanuel AME Church in Charleston, South Carolina, on Jan. 8, 2024.
Peter Zay/Anadolu via Getty Images
The president stopped his speech to address their concerns.
“I understand the passion,” he told them.
The president also swiped at Republican presidential candidates Nikki Haley, a former governor of South Carolina, and Trump, though he did not name either one.
Haley spent several days on the defensive for not explicitly naming slavery as the root cause of the Civil War when the question was posed to her by a participant at a campaign event. Mr. Biden called it a “lie” that the war was about states’ rights.
“So let me be clear, for those who don’t seem to know: Slavery was the cause of the Civil War. There’s no negotiation about that.”
He also noted the scores of failed attempts by Trump in the courts to overturn the 2020 election in an attempt to hold onto power, as well as the former president’s embrace of the deadly Jan. 6 insurrection at the Capitol.
“Let me say what others cannot: We must reject political violence in America. Always, not sometimes. Always. It’s never appropriate,” Mr. Biden said. He said “losers are taught to concede when they lose. And he’s a loser,” referring to Trump.
The president delivered his first campaign speech of the year outside Valley Forget last Friday, Jan. 5, nearly three years to the date after Trump’s supporters stormed the Capitol in an effort to prevent Mr. Biden’s ascent to the White House.
The Mother Emanuel shooting
It was June 17, 2015, when a 21-year-old White man walked into the church and, intending to ignite a race war, shot and killed nine Black parishioners and wounded one more. Mr. Biden was vice president when he attended the memorial service in Charleston.
The president’s aides and allies say the shootings are among the critical moments when the nation’s political divide started to sharpen and crack. Though Trump, the current Republican presidential front-runner, was not in office at the time and has called the shooting “horrible,” Mr. Biden is seeking to tie Trump’s current rhetoric to such violence.
Two years after the attack, as the “Unite The Right” gathering of white nationalists in Charlottesville, Virginia, erupted in violent clashes with counterprotesters. Trump said merely that “there is blame on both sides.”
Mr. Biden and his aides argue it’s all part of the same problem: Trump refused to condemn the actions of the white nationalists at that gathering. He’s repeatedly used rhetoric once used by Adolf Hitler to argue that immigrants entering the U.S. illegally are “poisoning the blood of our country,” yet insisted he had no idea that one of the world’s most reviled and infamous figures once used similar words.
And Trump has continually repeated his false claims that he won the 2020 election, as well as his assertion that the Capitol rioters were patriotic. He’s called the long prison sentences handed down for some offenders — whom he calls “hostages” and were convicted of crimes like assaulting police officers or seditious conspiracy — “one of the saddest things.”
At Mother Emanuel, Mr. Biden revisited themes from the Jan. 6 anniversary speech he delivered on Friday. He has repeatedly suggested that democracy itself is on the ballot, asking whether it is still “America’s sacred cause.”
Trump, who faces 91 criminal charges stemming from his efforts to overturn his loss to Mr. Biden and three other felony cases, argues that Mr. Biden and other top Democrats are themselves seeking to undermine democracy by using the legal system to thwart the campaign of the president’s chief rival.
In an interview with The Associated Press before Mr. Biden’s appearance, Malcolm Graham, a brother of Charleston church victim Cynthia Graham-Hurd, said threat of racism and hate-fueled violence is part of a needed national conversation about race and American democracy.
“Racism, hatred and discrimination continue to be the Achilles’ heel of America, of our nation,” said Graham, a city councilman in Charlotte, North Carolina. “Certainly, what happened to the Emanual Nine years ago is a visible example of that. What happened in Buffalo, years later, where people were killed under similar circumstances, shows that racism and discrimination are still real and it’s even in our politics.”
Graham said it was shameful that some politicians still struggle to link the Civil War and slavery. He said he feels the Trump administration was a preview of what it’s like to have a new generation of unrepentant white nationalists in power.
“As a nation, we can’t eradicate racism, hatred and discrimination, if it’s in the Oval Office,” he said. “We have to chart a different course.”
After his speech, the president visited a restaurant called Hannibal’s Kitchen with Clyburn, greeting voters. He also recorded a local radio interview.
A House Oversight committee report titled “White House For Sale” found evidence that former Donald Trump’s businesses received millions of dollars from foreign entities in 20 different countries during the time that he was president, including China and Saudi Arabia. What do you think?
“And people still have the nerve to say he’s xenophobic.”
Jasper Gerke, Technical Poet
Whites Ousted From Role As Master Race After Racist Past Comes To Light
“How else would he pay for his legal defense for accepting money from foreign countries?”
![Akoijam Sunita, 45, at a pop-up dinner she hosted in Bengaluru recently [Photo courtesy Lomba Kitchen]](https://www.aljazeera.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/03/Akoi-1709309390.jpeg?w=770&resize=770%2C513)
