Attention to the Unseen

Nikole Hannah-Jones writes: My dad always flew an American flag in our front yard. The blue paint on our two-story house was perennially chipping; the fence, or the rail by the stairs, or the front door, existed in a perpetual state of disrepair, but that flag always flew pristine. Our corner lot, which had been redlined by the federal government, was along the river that divided the black side from the white side of our Iowa town. At the edge…

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Time reports: When you think of a terrorist, what do you see? For more than a generation, the image lurking in Americans’ nightmares has resembled the perpetrators of the 9/11 attacks: an Islamic jihadist. Not a 21-year-old white supremacist from a prosperous Dallas suburb. But long before that young man drove to El Paso, Texas, on Aug. 3 and allegedly murdered at least 22 people at a Walmart crammed with back-to-school shoppers, it was clear that white nationalists have become…

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Helen Lewis writes: Most mass shooters are men. Sophie Walker, the former leader of Britain’s Women’s Equality Party, tweeted that fact soon after 51 people were killed by a gunman in Christchurch, New Zealand. (A Mother Jones database of all U.S. killing sprees since 1982 records four female killers and 111 male ones.) In response, she was deluged with angry emails and accused of “playing the gender card.” A BBC journalist told her, “Not sure now is the right time…

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The research doesn’t say what some lawmakers suggest every time there’s a mass shooting. Fredrick Tendong/Unsplash, CC BY By Christopher J. Ferguson, Stetson University In the wake of the El Paso shooting on Aug. 3 that left 22 dead and dozens injured, a familiar trope has reemerged: Often, when a young man is the shooter, people try to blame the tragedy on violent video games and other forms of media. This time around, Texas Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick placed some…

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Keith Payne writes: A friend complained to me recently that his son wasn’t getting into Ivy League colleges because it’s so hard for a middle-class white kid to be admitted, even with straight A’s. I asked if the advantages of being a middle-class white kid might be part of the reason his son had become a straight-A student in the first place. It got awkward. As our politics have fractured increasingly around race, there seems to be more and more…

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Rep. Ilhan Omar writes: Throughout history, demagogues have used state power to target minority communities and political enemies, often culminating in state violence. Today, we face that threat in our own country, where the president of the United States is using the influence of our highest office to mount racist attacks on communities across the land. In recent weeks, he has lashed out unprompted against four freshman Democrats in the House of Representatives: Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York, Ayanna Pressley…

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Elizabeth Cuna writes: I was a young teenager when it first happened. My little brother and I were outside the bus stop on the way to school. We were laughing and talking about kid stuff. All of a sudden, a group of older teen boys rolled up on their bikes. They circled us, made fun of how we looked and our accents, then they yelled at us to go back to a country they assumed we were from. My little…

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Clara Long and and Nicole Austin-Hillery write: A 14-year old told us she was taking care of a 4-year old who had been placed in her cell with no relatives. “I take her to the bathroom, give her my extra food if she is hungry, and tell people to leave her alone if they are bothering her,” she said. She was just one of the children we talked with last week as part of a team of lawyers and doctors…

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