Newsweek 7/10-7/17/2020

1964 Student activists signed up African Americans to register to vote during Mississippi’s Freedom Summer, and Newsweek reported that “somehow the mix of courage and energy and naiveté seemed to make, here and there, some small dents in the wall.” Violence marked the campaign, though: three activists were murdered by the KKK, and African Americans were scared away from registering by arrests and beatings and burnings of Black homes and churches. Today, approximately 16 percent of the voting-age Black population in Mississippi is legally barred from voting due to disenfranchisement laws. 1978 According to Newsweek, the Bakke case “went to the heart of the issue of preferential treatment of minorities.” The Supreme Court ruled that “race can be a factor in selecting students” for admission into institutions of higher education, but that “rigid…

It’s hard to take corporate kindness at face value. Chrysler’s Drive Forward ad campaign is about how we’re in this pandemic thing together. And it wants to help. By selling you a car. Amazon’s new commercial is about how you can order without feeling bad because of all it’s doing to keep its warehouse workers safe. Even though Amazon no longer will give numbers on how many workers have gotten sick and/or died. Or United Airlines’ March promise to leave empty seats in planes. Unless it’s a full flight. But some companies truly have been stepping up since the beginning of the pandemic with philanthropy—and more—as you’ll see in our following list. It’s been a long time coming. “Philanthropy used to be something the company did to get the CEO good…

AT LEAST 60 COLLEGES AND UNIVERSITIES across the country, and perhaps as many as 100 or more, are now being sued by students who believe they were short-changed when their in-person college experience was replaced by an online one after schools shut down campuses this spring due to the coronavirus pandemic. The students are demanding a refund on tuition and fees equal to the difference between what they paid for in advance and the instruction and educational services they actually received. The unprecedented number of class action lawsuits began as a trickle in April, picked up momentum in May, and have continued to expand throughout June, with experts saying there are likely many more to come. The schools currently facing student lawsuits include elite universities like Brown, Columbia, Duke, Emory and…

@GovWhitmer @LtGovGilchrist The murders of George Floyd, Ahmaud Arbery and Breonna Taylor are the latest illustration of hundreds of years of inequity and systemic racism against Black Americans. This is the culmination of governance that did not adequately center the values of equity, representation and opportunity for all. Going forward, we must prioritize these principles to build a more just and equitable country. We are simultaneously facing two of the most consequential crises of our lifetimes: COVID-19 and the persistence of police brutality. The pain of the convergence of these crises is being felt by those who can bear it the least. Black communities across the country have historically been underfunded and lack basic access to quality education, health care, housing, transportation and paths to opportunity. As a result, tens of thousands of…

“None of the allegations of being a hoax will break me or tear me down.”—NASCAR DRIVER BUBBA WALLACE ON THE NOOSE FOUND IN HIS GARAGE STALL“IT’S THE OPPOSITE. WE’RE GOING TO BE DOING MORE TESTING, NOT LESS.”—DR. ANTHONY FAUCI“Immigration has contributed immensely to America’s economic success…Disappointed by today’s proclamation—we’ll continue to stand with immigrants and work to expand opportunity for all.”—SUNDAR PICHAI, CEO OF ALPHABET INC.“The Disney movie I never even dared to dream. Thoroughly speechless.”—ACTOR LESLIE ODOM JR. ON THE UPCOMING HAMILTON“BEING BLACK, MAYBE THAT’S THE REASON WHY THEY ALWAYS MAD.”—Beyoncé in her new single “Black Parade”“As someone who’s been performing without an audience for the last 3 months, Mr. President, you get used to it.”—STEPHEN COLBERT“RAYSHARD BROOKS WASN’T JUST RUNNING FROM THE POLICE. HE WAS RUNNING FROM A…

CAN EIGHT MINUTES AND 46 seconds change the world? From London to Lisbon, Berlin to Brisbane, Pretoria to Paris, as well as Toronto, Tokyo, Rio de Janeiro and scores of other cities in dozens of other countries across the Americas, Europe, Asia, Africa and Australia, the answer, increasingly, seems to be yes. In the month that’s passed since George Floyd was killed and that horrifying, heartbreaking nearly nine-minute video revealed his treatment by four Minneapolis police officers, protests have spread beyond the U.S. and around the globe. The themes are at once universal—demonstrators demand justice for Floyd, and call for police reform and an end to systemic racism—and unique to the particular challenges of racial justice in each country. Protestors invoke the names of Black people killed in their country along…