Stream of Reading (Prepare to be Forwarded) – An Archive of What I'm Reading
When Saturday Night Live announced that it was hiring its first ever Latina cast member last week, it was landmark moment in the history of the show. Mexican-American comedian Melissa Villaseñor, 28, is part of a minority that is sorely represented when it comes to the likes of mainstream comedy. Yet her recruiting already has…
As the nation reels from a series of high-profile fatal shootings of black men by police officers, many have decried the lack of readily available data on how racial bias factors into American policing. But while it’s true that there is no adequate federal database of fatal police shootings (F.B.I. director James Comey has described…
I have watched many cities burn over the past two years. I cried over Ferguson. I cried over Baltimore. But there’s nothing like seeing your hometown on social media with a hashtag. I don’t want to talk about my family and friends. Worrying about them keeps me up at night. I don’t want to talk…
My day started with a video. A grainy scene shot on a school bus by a child with a phone; it captured a few seconds of some jolly middle-schoolers from Maryland chanting, en masse: “1,2,3,4, how many niggers are in my store?” Voices brimming with hilarity and excitement, they no doubt repeated that phrase over…
In July of 2010, journalist and provocateur Andrew Breitbart posted a video excerpt of remarks on his site purporting to expose “evidence of racism coming from a federal appointee and NAACP award recipient.” This was an explosive charge. The Tea Party was ascendant then and racial grievance was one of its animating features. In Obama’s…
O Friday, Ipublished an article about the gender divide in Apple‘s last two iPhone events. I pointed that while Apple has been vocal about its commitment to diversity, is not evident On Wednesday, when Apple introduced the iPhone 7, women spoke for approximately eight minutes; men spoke for 99. Ahead of publication, I emailed Apple for comment twice, with no…
Rather than distance himself from Colin Kaepernick in the wake of the quarterback’s recent decision to protest the national anthem, San Francisco 49ers owner Jed York has taken a step firmly in support of him. The 49ers announced in a press release Thursday evening that York planned to donate $1 million to organizations working to…
For how long does Europe’s racist right need to “rise” before it is acknowledged that Europe is racist and this is not the by product of recent social discontent? Across Europe, the media narrative goes more or less like this: 9/11 happened and that brought out a wave of Islamophobia that was used by manipulative…
At its milestone centennial, the National Park Service wrestles with how to diversify its visitors and workforce. Looking over the National Park Service’s first 100 years, we find a federal agency that, like many U.S. institutions, got off to a severely rocky start in terms of racial inclusion. These national parks were carved out, in…
In March of last year, Fusion published an article detailing the ways in which Nextdoor, a social network for neighbors, had become a home for racial profiling. In the “Crime and Safety” forum of many Nextdoor communities, users were reporting people as “suspicious” seemingly based primarily on the color of their skin. Nextdoor CEO Nirav…