FBI reveals: Threat to U.S. posed by white supremacists now equals that of ISIS. The threat America faces from white nationalist violence is at least equal to that posed by radical Islamist group ISIS, FBI Director Chris Wray told a Senate Homeland Security and Government Affairs Committee meeting on Wednesday. Wray told senators that "about 1000" cases of domestic terrorism were currently being investigated, and that that was approximately the same as the number of cases related to Islamic terrorism under investigation, The Hill has reported. According to the report however, independent data reveals that the number of attacks carried out and planned by white supremacists is almost double those undertaken by Islamists.
The bureau director however, refused to rank either threat as being more pressing than the other. "We take both of them very, very seriously," he said. "Our focus is on violence and threats of violence against the people of this country. Keep updated: Sign up to our newsletter Thank you for signing up. Click here Oops.
Please try again later. Thank you, America's Original Sin: Slavery and the Legacy of White Supremacy. The documents most closely associated with the creation of the United States—the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution—present a problem with which Americans have been contending from the country’s beginning: how to reconcile the values espoused in those texts with the United States’ original sin of slavery, the flaw that marred the country’s creation, warped its prospects, and eventually plunged it into civil war. The Declaration of Independence had a specific purpose: to cut the ties between the American colonies and Great Britain and establish a new country that would take its place among the nations of the world.
But thanks to the vaulting language of its famous preamble, the document instantly came to mean more than that. Its confident statement that “all men are created equal,” with “unalienable Rights” to “Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness,” put notions of freedom and equality at the heart of the American experiment. Stay informed. Each Dot On This Map Is A Place Where A Person Of Color Was Lynched. When a Chinese man tried to vote in Monterey, California, in 1885, a mob lynched him. In 1909, a black man was lynched in Florence, South Carolina, for allegedly injuring a mule. In 1934, another black man was lynched in Birmingham, Alabama for allegedly insulting a white woman. In total, in the century after the Civil War, as many as 5,000 people of color were lynched by mobs in the United States. In the 1890s, on average, nine people were lynched each month. A new website documents each known death on a map, often along with gruesome details about the killing and the size of the crowd.
RJ Ramey, who created the site, was inspired by a book about the history of lynching called At The Hands Of Persons Unknown. “It blew me away,” Ramey says. Ramey contacted the Tuskegee University Archives, where civil rights activist and sociologist Monroe Work had documented as many lynchings as possible during his career in the early 20th century. “This is our history,” he says.
America's Original Sin: Slavery and the Legacy of White Supremacy. MonroeWorkToday.org. On White Identity Politics and American Terrorism. The Brooklyn Museum mounted an exhibit on white racial terrorism this summer. It draws on research done by the Equal Justice Initiative, documenting 4,425 lynchings of black people by white mobs between 1877 and 1950.
The researchers found hundreds more of these public murders than we knew about previously, in dozens of counties. They charted it all on an interactive map. You can stand in the quiet of the museum exhibit’s entryway and zoom in on each blood-red county. Twenty lynchings in Polk County, Florida, 29 in Jefferson County, Alabama, 10 in Calhoun County, Arkansas. “The demographic geography of this nation was shaped by racial terrorism,” author and activist Bryan Stevenson told me recently, in describing his team’s research at the Equal Justice Initiative. The Brooklyn Museum selected several works from its permanent collection to accompany the Equal Justice Initiative’s research. “Not all of those people were neo-Nazis, believe me. How does that work? Explore. The American Dream Is Dead: Here’s Where It Went | Fast Company.
Look at a list of rags-to-riches billionaires, from Oprah to Starbucks CEO Howard Schultz, from immigrant investor George Soros to Jay-Z, and you’ll see a common thread. They all, by definition, made it. Hence, their classic American stories are self-fulfilling tales that allow them to package stories about their hustle and hard-won riches as an example to others. While such biographies are inspiring, and are frequently touted in business self-help advice, they don’t represent the stories of most Americans.
They are hold-overs of an era past. In reality, the U.S. ranks among the lowest of all developed countries in terms of the potential for upward mobility, despite clinging to the mythology of Horatio Alger. The Declaration of Independence may promise us all the pursuit of happiness, but if you’re born poor, you’re probably going to stay poor. Or, as Malcolm Gladwell puts it, “nowadays, we don’t learn from poverty, we escape from poverty.” Why is the U.S. less mobile? Why the white middle class is dying faster, explained in 6 charts. Librarians are realizing that overdue fines undercut libraries’ missions.
Photo illustration by Slate. Images via jmbatt, simo988/iStock. In 1906, a reporter for the Detroit Free Press described a scene that had become all too common at the city’s public libraries. A child hands an overdue book to a stern librarian perched behind a desk, and with a “sinister expression,” the librarian demands payment of a late fine. In some cases, the child grumbles and pays the penny or two. But in others—often at the city’s smaller, poorer library branches—the offender cannot pay, and his borrowing privileges are revoked. Ruth Graham is a regular Slate contributor. More than a century later, similar dramas are still enacted in libraries across the country every day. Library fines in most places remain quaintly low, sometimes just 10 cents per day.
The good news is that librarians are noticing. In Columbus, Ohio, the library board announced in December that it would eliminate overdue fines starting on Jan. 1. The New Face of American Unemployment. Tyler Moore’s late-December drive to Louisville, Ky., was one of desperation. He was headed four hours west on Interstate 64 to interview for a job. Even if he landed the position, filling his gas tank had left him with $8 to his name. He would have to sleep at a friend’s place until he could earn enough to pay rent. The 23-year-old had run out of options. “A simple lifestyle, but being able to have work: I ain’t got to have nothing exquisite” “Minimum-wage jobs, fast-food restaurants, Wal-Mart, anything like that, a lot of them has already been took,” he says in an Appalachian drawl, explaining that the backlog just to interview was a long as a year.
Moore’s story paints an extreme picture of how an economic environment can create a vicious circle of joblessness. Photographer: Photographer Name/Bloomberg His problems started in earnest in 2014. Moore lost his job in late 2013 after smoking marijuana and failing a drug test. Opportunities are few. This Map of U.S. Lynchings Spans 1835 to 1964. The practice wasn’t limited to the South, as this new visualization of racial violence in the Jim Crow era proves.
Lynchings formed the bloody backdrop of Southern life for a century after the Civil War. Between the 1860s and 1960s, thousands of black Americans were killed in public acts of racial terror. Millions more fled to cities in the North and West in an effort to escape this environment. Many soon discovered that, in many ways, the rest of American society was no less racist. How many lynchings occurred during the Jim Crow era? A new map project called Monroe Work Today—named after the pioneering black sociologist who gathered much of the data—aims to be the most comprehensive catalogue of proven lynchings that took place in the United States from 1835 to 1964. Map readers can explore the database by bracketing a timeline to specific years. The mapmakers go into great detail on the sources and accuracy of their data. Work was one of those advocates. Watch Asian Americans recount racist microaggressions they experience every day.
Watch This 10-Minute Film to Understand the Attack on Voting Rights. Election history will be made in less than five weeks, and not just because voters may choose the nation's first female president. This will be the first presidential election in 50 years where citizens will cast their ballots without the protections of key portions of the Voting Rights Act. Signed into law in August 1965, the law was designed to help racial minorities overcome decades of racism and discrimination in registering to vote and casting ballots. The law sought to do a whole host of things to expand and protect voting rights, and chief among them was a provision that blocked jurisdictions with a history of discrimination from enacting new voting procedures or laws without the review of the US Department of Justice or a federal judge.
But in 2013 the US Supreme Court, in Shelby County v. The American Soul Is a Murderous Soul. In 1923, the British novelist D. H. Lawrence offered a grim assessment of America and Americans: “All the other stuff, the love, the democracy, the floundering into lust, is a sort of by-play. The essential American soul is hard, isolate, stoic, and a killer. It has never yet melted.” Lawrence’s observations of the American character did not draw upon deep wells of direct personal experience. The allegation that the American character is essentially murderous — or at least more murderous than that of other nations — still strikes a chord today. Or consider the strenuousness with which each political party now routinely denies that Americans are inherently violent, a refrain that can begin to feel like protesting too much. Democrats likewise tend to suggest that, for Americans, acts of violence are an aberration.
FBI agents investigate a damaged wall of the nightclub in Orlando, Florida, where a mass shooter, Omar Mateen, killed 49 people on June 12, 2016. The U.N. Half of Wisconsin's Black Neighborhoods Are Jails. 17-year-old Lew Blank researched race and housing in his state and found some disturbing patterns. 17-year-old Lew Blank was fiddling around with the Weldon Cooper Center’s Racial Dot Map when he discovered something disturbing about Wisconsin, where he lives: More than half of the African-American neighborhoods in the state are actually jails.
Not only that, but the rest of the black neighborhoods across the state are either apartment complexes, Section 8 housing, or homeless shelters—the lone exception being a working-middle class section of Milwaukee. Sharing this info on the Young, Gifted, and Black Coalition’s blog, Blank explains that he used the Racial Dot Map to identify where predominantly black neighborhoods—defined as “a certain area where the majority of residents are African Americans”—are located throughout the state. There are 56 of them, 31 of which are either jails or prisons. There are 15 cities where the only black neighborhood is a jail. This kid is woke. Michigan judge strikes down straight-party voting ban. Photo by JIM WATSON/AFP/Getty Images It’s official: The week of the Republican National Convention has been a terrific week for voting rights in the United States.
Not because of the RNC—the GOP platform explicitly endorses voter suppression laws—but because federal courts across the country have struck down state measures designed to make voting harder for minorities. First, a federal judge found that Wisconsin’s stringent voter ID laws placed an undue burden on many citizens’ fundamental right to vote; then an appeals court found that Texas’ even more draconian voter ID law had a discriminatory effect on minority communities in violation of the Voting Rights Act. Now a federal judge in Michigan has invalidated the state’s ban on straight-party voting, finding that the law violates both the Voting Rights Act and the United States Constitution.
Mark Joseph Stern is a writer for Slate. Drain then adds this acid coda: The Virginia driver’s license scheme that punishes poor people. Karen Bleier/AFP/Getty Images In the aftermath of the death of Michael Brown and subsequent events in Ferguson, the Justice Department revealed a shocking bit of news: Missouri police departments were systematically issuing trivial fines and court costs against their very poorest citizens to raise revenue for local government functions. Ta-Nehisi Coates described this at the time as “plunder made legal,” and on Friday, one neighboring municipality agreed to pay $4.7 million to 2,000 citizens who had faced such abuse.
Perhaps the worst part of the Missouri grift lay in the revelation that this system was keeping some of the state’s very poorest citizens from any possibility of ever emerging out of a bottomless spiral of destitution, homelessness, and debt. Ferguson and other municipalities were essentially criminalizing being poor. Dahlia Lithwick writes about the courts and the law for Slate, and hosts the podcast Amicus.
You can surely argue that driving is a privilege and not a right. Donald Trump and the Meaning of Protectionism. On June 28, Donald Trump delivered a speech of uncharacteristic narrative coherence to an audience in Monessen, Pennsylvania, a small city that used to specialize in steel manufacturing. He attributed the area’s economic troubles to a variety of causes originating outside the state of Pennsylvania, including NAFTA, trade with China, and illegal Mexican immigration. Like a Medieval pathologist, Trump identified a real affliction and prescribed a remedy that could kill the patient.
Trump’s core demographic, white men without a college degree, have been battered by several decades of globalization and technological change. But his ideas are the equivalent of bloodletting, according to many economists. The U.S. could use some protection—just not the variety that Trump offers. Most people think of protectionism as externally focused—for example, protecting companies from foreign competition. Imagine a policy matrix: open vs. protective on one axis, home vs. abroad on the other. What Do 'Black-on-Black Crime' and the 'Ferguson Effect' Have To Do With Police Violence?
In discussing the current wave of public demonstrations against police violence overtaking city downtowns and highways, some law-and-order absolutists have attempted to derail productive conversation in a number of ways. One person who’s been trying to keep the conversation on track is the University of Missouri-St. Louis criminology professor Richard Rosenfeld, who is considered an expert on matters of urban violence. Rosenfeld has written dozens of books and studies on this topic, dating back to his seminal 1975 article “On the Social Mechanisms of White Supremacy” for the academic journal The Pacific Sociological Review. When the term “Ferguson Effect” first made its way into the national vocabulary last summer Rosenfeld penned a study that debunked its central premise: That crime began rising after the outcry in Ferguson over the police-involved killing of Michael Brown.
More recently, he produced a report for the U.S. Certainly not the way Giuliani put the issue. Not at all. White Trash: The 400-Year Untold History of Class in America by Nancy Isenberg, reviewed. American is becoming a majority-minority nation. It’s already happened in our public schools. What in the World: Segregation in 2016? Forbes Welcome. Experts Share Their Outlooks on K-12 Education in an Era of Broken Schools. 10153803_940424502687063_8266387530982258470_n.jpg (JPEG Image, 960 × 670 pixels) America’s transportation system discriminates against minorities and poor: Federal funding for roads, buses, and mass transit still segregates Americans.