white america
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Report: It Turns Out White Guilt Drove NFL to Entertain Colin Kaepernick's Return, Create 'Fake' Interest
In the immediate aftermath of the death of George Floyd at the hands of Minnesota police officers, white America experienced a reckoning of sorts. Record labels apologized for historically exploiting Black artists, cities painted murals in recognition of the Black Lives Matter movement, racists got outed, institutions distanced themselves from their oppressive origins—basically, white folks…
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Could Pre-Employment Marijuana Tests Become a Thing of the Past? Nevada Becomes 1st State to Kiss Them Goodbye
Potheads throughout the world the state of Nevada, rejoice! CNN reports that beginning in 2020, employers in the state can no longer refuse to hire a job applicant for failing a marijuana screening test, making it the first state in the country to enforce such a rule. And considering it’s perfectly legal in Nevada to…
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Racism Works
“Yet the harsh fact is that in many places in this country men and women are kept from voting simply because they are Negroes. Every device of which human ingenuity is capable has been used to deny this right. The Negro citizen may go to register only to be told that the day is wrong,…
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Nothing Reminds You That You're Black in White America Like Trying to Buy a House
Five weeks ago, moments after landing back in Pittsburgh after a two-day long trip to Chicago, I switched off airplane mode, checked my phone, and saw a transcribed voicemail from my mortgage consultant, asking me to call him back. We were 11 days away from closing. The loan and the interest rate had already been…
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5 Times James Baldwin Read White America
Today marks 30 years since James Baldwin’s passing, and America seems to be as ignorant of its inherent racism as it was when Baldwin was writing and being an all-around brilliant man, scholar and activist. Sometimes I like to imagine a James Baldwin fan fiction of what he’d be doing today if he were still…
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55 Percent of White Americans Believe Whites Face Racial Discrimination, Which Means 55 Percent of White Americans Are Really Stupid!
As Halloween nears, I’m reminded of the time 20 or so years ago when my then-7-year-old nephew spent the entire year talking about Halloween. How much candy he was going to get, how great his costume was going to be, how many houses he was going to hit—he was an unceasing stream of Halloween-related predictions,…
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White America Must Heal Itself: 2016 Is 1965 and 1984
Last weekend, during a writing retreat, I ended up in Mount Vernon, Iowa. Iowa entered the Union as a free state and was a hub for the Underground Railroad, but I wasn’t surprised to see a handful of Confederate flags flying from homes as I drove through towns called Solon and North Liberty. Ours has…