Free Republic

An insult uttered in schools and boardrooms about many marginalized people has a new high-profile target: Kamala Harris, the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee. “I think she’s one of the weakest candidates I’ve ever seen in the history of our country. I mean intellectually, just really kind of the bottom of the barrel. ... I think that she was a DEI hire,” Rep. Harriett Hageman, a Wyoming Republican, said of Harris. For Black diversity, equity and inclusion professionals, the attacks on Harris as a “DEI hire” or a “DEI candidate” show the ways racial tropes can be used against Black people...

For sociologist Rodney Coates, the news of the reversal of Roe v. Wade triggered painful personal trauma. In the 1940s, his aunt, a teenager at the time, was forced to travel from their home in East St. Louis, Illinois, to have an abortion in Chicago, “the closest place where she could find a doctor that would treat a Black woman,” he said. The procedure was legal, but “it was botched,” said Coates, a professor of critical race and ethnic studies at Miami University in Ohio. “And she died 400 miles away from her family.

When he was a kid, Marquis Grissom Jr. would sometimes shed tears in the car on the ride home from youth baseball games. He cried because he heard “racist comments” from white opponents — players and especially parents, he said — as he competed on the field with an all-Black youth team in Atlanta. As the World Series plays out this weekend between the Atlanta Braves and Houston Astros, the glaring lack of Black players on both teams, and MLB in general, is not lost on Grissom. The Braves and Astros each have one Black player on their World Series...